Over the weekend: Kostov/Valkov Duo; Younggun Kim
An outsized talent on the cello
November 5, 2013No musician in my experience, on any instrument, has conveyed the sheer joy of music-making more completely than did the cellist Lachezar Kostov in an altogether compelling performance Sunday afternoon with the gifted pianist Viktor Valkov.
Both are natives of Bulgaria and doctoral students at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where Mr. Kostov studies with Norman Fischer, Mr. Valkov with Jon Kimura Parker. They have performed as the Kostov/Valkov Duo for more than a decade. They agreed on short notice to appear on the Camerata San Antonio concert series in Christ Episcopal Church after the scheduled violinist, Anastasia Storer, suffered an injury.
newest
member of the cello section of the San Antonio Symphony —
but it’s hard to imagine that a musician of such outsized
talent can stay out of the solo spotlight for very long. The pair’s program opened with important French works, the cello-and-piano sonatas of Claude Debussy and Francis Poulenc. The second half was quirkier, holding the duo’s own arrangements of Franz Liszt’s “Evocation a la Chapelle Sixtine” and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 and Frédéric Chopin’s Introduction and Polonaise Brillante, Op. 3. Fully capable of standing among such distinguished company was “Structures,” a work written for the Kostov/Valkov Duo by Robert Gross, who teaches composition at Rice.
Throughout the program, Mr. Kostov revealed no technical limitations and a very powerful toolbox of colors, inflections and dynamics — all of which proved to be, in a sense, irrelevant. Such was his mastery of technique that it came as naturally to him as breathing, and execution became simply a given. At no time was this performance about the notes on the printed score. It was always about the music as a living thing.
And Debussy’s familiar sonata has never seemed more alive. This was a kinetic, bold account. It was also fully attentive to Debussy’s obsessively detailed instructions regarding dynamics and tempo, yet the performance sounded totally free. Mr. Kostov’s instrument seemed so much an extension of his body and his instincts that the sonata became as much dance as music. Mr. Valkov delivered his part with admirable clarity and precision.
In the cavatine movement of the Poulenc sonata, Mr. Kostov’s long glissandi seemed entirely organic, and his playing in the muted melody was heartbreakingly lovely. The quicker movements were remarkable for their vivacity and rhythmic acuity, from both partners.
The brief pieces from Gross’s “Structures” were uncompromisingly Modern, protean and rhythmically adventurous, but they also kept a toe dipped in Romantic waters. The music was intellectually serious, as one expects from anyone on the Rice faculty, but also unpredictable and equipped at times with a wry wit. It reflected a distinctive and eminently worthy voice.
The duo’s own arrangements were worthy additions to the cello-and-piano repertoire.
At the beginning of Liszt’s “Evocation,” originally an organ work woven from Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus” and a snatch of Gregorian chant, low tone clusters on the piano announced that we were no longer in the 19th century, but nothing in the arrangement violated the spirit of the piece, which was harmonically weird for its time. The cello part ended on a sustained high note that would be a challenge even for a violin, but it left Mr. Kostov undaunted.
Chopin composed his Introduction and Polonaise Brillante for cello and piano, but the duo’s arrangement distributed the labor more evenly and more idiomatically. Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsondy No. 2, a guaranteed show-stopper in any guise, certainly had that effect in this arrangement, with authoritative, charismatic performances from both players.
On Saturday night, in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, the Korean-Canadian pianist Younggun Kim returned to town to play a demanding program for the San Antonio International Piano Competition’s recital series. Mr. Kim had been a finalist, but not a medalist, in the 2012 edition of the competition.
His program included three of the most familiar arrows in any virtuoso’s quiver — the Liszt Sonata in B minor, the Prokofiev Sonata No. 7 and Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise in A-flat — along with a waltz and a nocturne by Chopin, a sonata by Haydn and the Myra Hess arrangement of Bach’s cantata movement “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
Mr. Kim demonstrated dexterity, speed and power in abundance, but musicality
too often went missing.
He did evince a good sense of direction in the Liszt sonata, no mean feat, but he tended to overstatement, and some of his tempi were unreasonably fast, to no clear musical purpose. There were some nice moments in Haydn’s Sonata in A-flat, Hob. XVI, No. 46, especially in the slow movement, to which he brought some personal feeling and lively tempo play. He made a strong impression with his crisp, brash and muscular account of the opening allegro of the Prokofiev sonata. But in the finale his very fast tempo was drained of the requisite sense of propulsion.
Mike Greenberg
Cellist Lachezar Kostov and pianist Viktor Valkov at Christ Episcopal Church