Tom Strini
Milwaukee Symphony

Violinist Gil Shaham is special

By - Feb 2nd, 2012 01:18 am
gil-shaham-mso

Gil Shaham

The most intimate and intense musical joy, at the outset of Brahms’ Violin Concerto Wednesday evening, expanded to fill the sky to the horizons. The concerto has its brooding moments — this is Brahms, and every emotion is a mixed emotion. But as soloist Gil Shaham, conductor Edo de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra read the piece, the irresistible impulse of the music is irrepressible happiness.

Shaham’s presence reinforced this impression. He listened to the orchestra with an enraptured smile. When he played, he looked and sounded truly at play. He traded glances with concertmaster Frank Almond, and got him to smiling, too. Shaham danced a lively step or two with the gypsy-fiddling bits at the end of the concerto. He might have been playing one of the most difficult concertos in the repertoire, but no kid on a water slide has more fun that Shaham had Wednesday night.

His happiness was our happiness. Shaham had it all going: Perfect pitch laced with expressive vibrato, full and infinitely varied tone, blazing speed with no hint of haste or strain, generous phrasing with lots of room to breathe, neat rhythmic proportions inflected with expressive rubato, the most delicate and miraculously present of high pianissimos. The dazzling technique and command served the higher purpose of spreading joy. We could vicariously share his delight in the doing as he released the joy locked in the ink Brahms applied to music paper in 1878.

Shaham answered a tumultuous ovation with an encore, a bright, propulsive reading of the Gavotte en rondeau from Bach’s Partita No. 3.

The concerto’s orchestra part is substantial and subtle. De Waart and the MSO responded to their soloist in kind and played with great energy, conviction and precision, one virtuoso to another.

The MSO played Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 (“The Great”) last Friday and Saturday, and de Waart reprised it Wednesday. I was glad to hear it again; I always hear more the second time around. The orchestra sounded even more tautly focused and freely expressive with a couple of performances behind them. That and, perhaps, the experimental re-arrangment of the orchestra — basses moved to house left, the horns to the back of the woodwinds, the big brasses on the floor rather than risers, and the shell ceiling adjusted down a big — intensified the physical presence of the music within Uihlein Hall. It wasn’t louder, just more alive.

The Shaham program was a one-night special. The MSO and de Waart will be back in Uihlein Hall at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 3-5) for Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 and Piano Concerto No. 2, with Joyce Yang as the soloist. This will be Yang’s fourth MSO appearance since 2009 — she was just here in November, when she played a brilliant Tchaikovsky First on a one-night special.

I met Yang before Wednesday’s concert; she’s a smart, funny, complicated young woman and a great interview. I’ll publish that story as soon as I can Thursday; you’ll want to read that one.

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