There is something unsettling about watching Leonidas Kavakos, who stands about 6’1”, play the violin. His frame dwarfs the instrument; his left wrist contorts to fit his fingers on an instrument that looks manifestly too small for him. But the awkwardness you see cannot be heard. There was nothing in particular about the left hand technique, as far as his sound, that struck me.
What did strike me was his masterful bow hand, which he used to make time all but stop. More than once, he went from full speed to a near standstill in an instant—a rubato so sudden it felt like slamming on the brakes—and then let his sound fade until it was barely audible, his tone in those moments almost diaphanous. My tennis coach told me recently that on the serve, you can always speed up, but it is very hard to slow down, so you should go as slowly as you can until it is time to go fast; only the very skilled, he said, can go from fast to slow. Kavakos went from slow to fast and from fast to slow with equal skill, but what astonished me was how quickly he could go from full speed to almost nothing.
Kavakos used his bow hand to great effect in the finale, too, where I heard so much variety in the texture of his spiccato in the ascending and descending runs. Nothing was done with time, and nothing was done with dynamics; the variety was all in the texture.
The ensemble was not always perfect, especially in the Canzonetta, but somehow it was convincing. It often reminded me of those historical recordings of Chopin in which the bel canto right hand flies a little untethered from the left, and it was just as effective here.
For an encore, Kavakos played the Gavotte en Rondeau from Bach’s Third Partita, and it was simply beautiful. He used vibrato, and the lack thereof, to great effect, drawing out contrasts and bringing so much color to his playing. The ornamentation grew with each return of the refrain, until in its final appearance there was hardly a moment without an interpolated scale.
The Shostakovich was incredible. At the beginning of the first movement, the strings had a rich, cohesive, unified sound. The second movement was measured and poised despite brimming with rage and energy. Music with this kind of machine-like energy—the 8th string quartet, 2nd movement; or the Allegro precipitato from Prokofiev’s 7th sonata—risks spiraling out of control, and then it loses its focus: it burns bright, but like a bonfire. This was a laser.
The silence after the second movement was jaw-dropping. One of my favorite parts of any concert is the silence after the playing stops, whether the music fades into nothing and you want to savor the quiet or it ends in an explosion and leaves you in shock. Those moments are hard to enjoy, since someone inevitably starts clapping or coughing. But the second movement ends the second way, and for a good few seconds after it, there was true silence. It was amazing.
Overall, the Shostakovich was great, and a reminder of why the Tenth is one of my favorite symphonies.