This entry is a review of the Sayaka Shoji & Menahem Pressler Duo Recital, recorded at the Suntory Hall Main Hall on 10 April this year and broadcast yesterday, 31 July 2014, on NHK’s BS Classic Club.
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Sayaka Shoji has been growing year by year — or rather, she has been steadily deepening and becoming a better musician. I wrote some thoughts on her duo recital with Gianluca Cascioli a few years back, but she has grown yet another step since then, into an even more mature violinist. The same strong conviction as always. A half-ascetic approach, with a dark tone that at times calls to mind the viola, pressing ever inward toward the inner life of the music, digging deeper again and again.
I would not say that her tone is especially beautiful in a conventional sense, and yet at her age she already produces a sound of such rich, savoured depth — particularly in the dying away of a note, and in the silences that follow, as though she thirsts for some truth within them. How much truth will she yet find within music as she continues on?
At the piano was Menahem Pressler, a grand old gentleman of 90. Born in Germany of Jewish heritage, he fled Nazi persecution and emigrated to America in 1939, going on to serve for many years as the pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio. Here were two people separated in age by something close to a generation and a half, and yet through violin and piano they leaned toward each other as though each were holding the other up. . .
【Menahem Pressler】
The final work on the programme is the Brahms Sonata. There are few sonatas written with such delicacy. It is an extraordinarily beautiful gem of a piece. As I listen to us play it, the beauty is such that I myself come close to tears by the end. The piano and violin are exquisitely entwined, and a true dialogue takes place between them. The piano is the rain, and Sayaka is singing in that rain.【Sayaka Shoji】
The longing that Brahms poured into this sonata is something truly special. I hope we can draw out that atmosphere. I find myself picturing Brahms sitting by a window, looking out. Gazing at the rain outside, remembering beautiful, cherished days long past, then being pulled back to the present, then drifting into dreams again — that dreamy, half-waking mood. . .
Old now, the body already worn — and yet, overcome with feeling again and again, the Rain Song skipping like a needle on a record. And somehow that only makes it speak to us all the more deeply. The encore was a violin-and-piano arrangement of Debussy’s “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” But this was no ordinary, trite piece of girlish fancy — it had the frail, fleeting quality of a white-haired old woman looking back with fondness on a girlhood long ago. Sayaka Shoji was extraordinary. . . Then Menahem Pressler gave a solo performance of Chopin’s posthumous Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp minor — and during the Nocturne, Sayaka Shoji sat quietly at his side.
Menahem Pressler is a late-blooming master whose playing has only grown in quality and depth with each passing year. Compared even with the recording from his Japan tour three years ago, his sound has been honed still further — the luminous quality woven from the light of individual notes, the gradations of tone, all of it clearly drawing closer to some kind of heavenly staircase. A sound that only a person who has reached a certain realm at this age could produce: gentle and pearlescent, each note distinct, utterly pure, fresh. Sound released with no ego, no straining, no forcing of any kind. The way he draws a pianissimo note, dissolves it, lets it stop — yes . . . performing by his will alone . . . not so much playing as deciding, from within a sequence of notes that seems to have always existed in some form, how each one should be brought to its close. That, I felt with quiet certainty as I listened to the Nocturne he played alone as the final encore, is the very essence of what this man draws from the piano, note by note.
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A CD/SACD of this duo’s performances together is unfortunately not available at the time of writing, but for Menahem Pressler’s piano solo recordings, a high-quality SACD on the BIS label, recorded in England in 2012, has recently been released. It includes the Chopin Nocturne No. 20 as well. This is probably among the very best recordings of Menahem Pressler currently in existence.
“Rain Song” Sayaka Shoji & Pressler Japan Tour Recital to be released on SHM-CD!
No sooner had I written this entry than it was announced that the recital featuring Sayaka Shoji and Pressler is to receive an emergency release on Deutsche Grammophon as a commemorative Japan tour edition. “A miraculous collaboration across a 60-year age gap! The ultimate concert, in which Sayaka Shoji has chosen the partner she most wanted to perform with and the music she most wanted to play.” The scheduled release date is 15 October 2014, in high-quality SHM-CD format. The Classic Club broadcast featured the recording from Suntory Hall, but the CD version appears to include the performance from Kamakura Performing Arts Centre ※ It is understood that DG will select the better of the two performances from across both dates. What is a shame is that the overwhelming encore — Pressler’s solo Chopin Nocturne — is not included. . . I would have loved to have had this released as a two-disc set with all the encores, nothing cut.
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Sayaka Shoji Louvre Recital: an introduction
In truth, I am not exactly a fan of Sayaka Shoji as a violinist, at least not at the moment. How to put it — she interests me, and I find I can’t quite look away? So I haven’t gone around collecting all her CDs the way a fan would, but the one recording I do have to hand is her second studio album for Deutsche Grammophon, recorded when she was 18 — the Louvre Recital. My first impression on hearing it was that she sounded as though she was having an argument with the pianist Itamar Golan. Both of them are strong-willed, and it would be hard to call it harmonious — more like a hot session of violent clashing, and for us listeners, it had the feel of being whacked over the head with two stones — no, two wills.
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Well, the pianist Itamar Golan gave a somewhat — how to say — slightly ungracious impression of still sizing up this young upstart girl’s abilities, as if to say: if you’re not up to it, I’ll take over and swallow the music whole. After this they would go on to form a duo on numerous further occasions, but . . . it’s a tough listen. Honestly, listening to those two together is absolutely exhausting. Itamar Golan seems to have a fondness for Japan, given how frequently he performs with Japanese violinists of all sorts. Though both are of Jewish heritage, he is an entirely different type from Menahem Pressler. Personally, I find I prefer Pressler’s way of playing now — always generating something newly beautiful within chamber music, through peaceful dialogue and harmony.
Thursday, 31 July
6:00 a.m. – 6:55 a.m.
Classic Club: Sayaka Shoji & Menahem Pressler Duo Recital
“Violin Sonata in B-flat major, K. 454 — 1st movement”
(Composer) Mozart / (Violin) Sayaka Shoji / (Piano) Menahem Pressler
“Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, Op. 78”
(Composer) Brahms / (Violin) Sayaka Shoji / (Piano) Menahem Pressler
“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”
(Composer) Debussy / (Violin) Sayaka Shoji / (Piano) Menahem Pressler
“Nocturne in C-sharp minor, posthumous”
(Composer) Chopin / (Piano) Menahem Pressler
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