Wunderkind
Nineteen-year-old guest violinist Stefan Jackiw steals limelight at second installment of the NSO's 2004 Beethoven Festival
by Bill Levine
It was a triumph of youth over age, true to the spirit of Romanticism. As with the previous week's concert, the high point of last Saturday's Nashville Symphony appearance was not the featured Beethoven symphony, but rather a work by one of his successors that hinged on a bravura solo performance set elegantly against the symphony's well-oiled machinery. The sight of Harvard sophomore Stefan Jackiw, the guest soloist on violin, being ushered gently by the boyish associate conductor Byung-Hyun Rhee could lead only to encouraging thoughts for a rising generation of classical music.
A perennial crowd-pleaser, Mendelssohn's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E minor can be a clinic in solo technique, even as it never quite allows the violinist to run away from the orchestra's gravitational pull. Its sensibilities are closer to Brahms than Paganini. It would be patronizing to assert that Jackiw played marvelously for someone his age, but however nuanced a "mature" interpretation would sound, this concerto was, after all, conceived before Mendelssohn turned 30 (although it took six more years to finish), warranting a soloist who can convey youthful vigor and purity.
Jackiw's runs through the higher register had a slightly nagging or worrying tone to them, but the numerous other technical demands of this piece were fluidly integrated into its larger, decorously lyrical scope as well as being humbly individualized. The young soloist's command of breakneck speeds, his ease at making about-face shifts in melodic improvisations, and his pointed control of the violin's aggressive techniques, such as double-stopping and staccato pouncing on the strings, all foretell his evolving stardom.
Displaying a certain tact and modesty in the starring role, Jackiw inadvertently set the tone for a minor theme of this week's Beethoven Festival program. As Rhee jokingly promised at the start of the concert, the audience would appreciate Beethoven's Eighth Symphony because it's short, clocking in at just under 30 minutes. Beethoven considered the Eighth his "little symphony," reflecting on the difference of scale between this faintly nostalgic work and the colossal Ninth, truly his final symphonic statement, separated by 12 years, an extended creative drought and a major transition toward darker, more complex music. But even the Eighth Symphony, well contained as it is, can make unfamiliar demands on a typical listener and not just a drowsy Weinkenner or two at the ground-floor tables.
In his inimitable way, Beethoven's waltzing refrain at the start of the symphony becomes deeply underscored by lurking tensions and sharp tonal shifts that push it beyond buoyant gentility. The heightened dominant theme hovers suspensefully at the end of the second movement and returns, after a quizzical, chamber-like minuet, to a reigned-in sublime in the oft-excerpted finale, never letting itself get carried away by its moments of gustiness—nor ever questing toward the eye of the storm. Despite a few tentative transitional passages and flatly juxtaposed contrasts, Rhee elicited the earnest, varied feelings that each unit of the orchestra precisely expressed in this late, fond farewell to an earlier civilizing classicism, free of Romantic discontent.
