Boston Musical Intelligencer Review: Musical Marital Equality
"The most successful marriages are often those in which partners feel free to express themselves, but also agree to support each other in mutual endeavors. That’s also true in chamber music partnerships, particularly those involving a pianist and a violinist. Audiences sometimes forget that a “violin sonata” is really a sonata for piano and violin in which the two instrumentalists are equal in importance.
This applied Saturday evening in Jordan Hall when the Franck Sonata was performed by violinist Nancy Zhou and pianist Weicong Zhang. Their performance of the sonata, which was among the finest this listener has heard in the last 30-odd years, concluded their recital, which was sponsored by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts.
The Franck Sonata, which oft frequents concerts, has always attracted the most celebrated violinists, but it fails without an equally strong pianist — because the part for the piano is among the most difficult in in the chamber music repertory. Fiddle players call it “the Frank Sinatra.”
Written in 1886 and dedicated to the Belgian violinist, Eugène Ysaÿe, it has color, strength, fire, and enough outbursts by each instrument to keep listeners engaged. It also has enough rhythmic repetition and thematic consistency from movement to movement to make it not only an extremely cohesive work, but also a dangerous one. In his memoirs, Richter said that without a partner like Oistrakh, he found it banal, histrionic, and tedious — all at the same time!:
Read the rest of the review here.