Playing chamber music can have a beneficial, calming effect on the most wayward, impulsive performers. Previous encounters with Khatia Buniatishvili have suggested she is a pianist of enormous talent and considerable musical insight, but one who does not always focus those gifts with as much precision and subtlety as she might, so that everything becomes too relentlessly full-on. Here, though, she was partnering Renaud Capuçon in three violin sonatas, and as well as sharing winsome hairstyles that regularly flopped forward fetchingly over their eyes, they proved to be judicious and supportive recital partners, her playing nicely matched to his generously warm and forthright style.
The first half contrasted Brahms and Bartók; both, in a sense, are conversational works, though very different sorts of dialogue. The Brahms A major Sonata Op 100 begins almost mid-sentence, as if taking up the threads of an exchange that had started earlier, and Capuçon and Buniatishvili identified that almost casual feeling immediately, perfectly judging the give and take with which some ideas are exchanged or shared, others contradicted. In Bartók's Second Sonata, one of the greatest and least heard of 20th-century works for violin and piano, the statements are much more acerbic and atonal; violin and piano state their own positions, hardly ever viewing things from each other's perspective. The instruments proceed in parallel rather than interlock, in a trajectory that culminates in a breathless moto perpetuo before the unlikely C major ending.
All that was sustained with such beautifully controlled excitement that Beethoven's Spring Sonata Op 24 after the interval seemed an anticlimax. A cooler, more classical detachment about the performance might have helped; the piano playing was rather assertive, the violin phrasing too indulgent. And in their first encore, the finale of César Franck's Violin Sonata, Buniatishvili allowed herself a few fiery flashes, too; by then, though, nobody really minded.
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