May 3–10, 2001

music

Young Stringer

Violinist Judith Ingolfsson shows her mettle.

by Peter Burwasser

Judith Ingolfsson

Violin. Sunday, April 29, Field Concert Hall.

At the center of violinist Judith Ingolfsson’s technically demanding, often flashy recital there was the Partita No. 1 of Bach, a great building block of the violinist’s repertoire. All of the other music seemed to radiate out from this work. Ingolfsson played Bach with heart, as is proper, but also in a thoughtful and deliberate way, as she came to grips with the dense structure of the music. This is a tremendous challenge in music that can have three lines of melody proceeding at the same time, and without the safety net of a piano accompaniment. Mostly, this young Icelandic artist strung together her notes to form coherent and well supported lines. Only in the perilously jagged contours of the Sarabande did her pulse waver once or twice, slightly disturbing the momentum.

If Ingolfsson’s tone in the Bach was woody, multi-hued and exuding a cello-like warmth, it was bright and silvery in the Sonata No. 1 of Fauré. And if her phrasing was precise and finely graduated in the Bach, it was bold and muscular in the Fauré. In the trashy, but fun Carmen Fantasy of Sarasate, there were combinations of both approaches, as the violinist reaches into a bag of tricks to make the instrument produce as wide a range of sounds as possible. This concert-goer would not mind if the Carmen Fantasy were never played again, but there is no denying the great flair and fire that Ingolfsson brought to this shameless show piece. Even as Ingolfsson showed an ability to approach different music in different ways, a distinct personality was consistent, steely and intelligent.

Ingolfsson opened her program, for the last Curtis Alumni recital of the season, with Autumn Music by Ned Rorem, who is also a Curtis alum. Rorem takes a dark view of the season, depicting sinister winds with cascades of notes. The pianist, in this case the very able Ronald Sat, also gets a work-out, including an especially vivid section in which he must race arpeggios up and down the full length of the keyboard while the violinist delivers a bristling pizzicato counterpoint. Even on this glorious spring afternoon, Rorem, and his interpreters, sent chills down the spines of the audience.