Straight from the heart: Violinist Tim Fain lit up F&M College’s Barshinger Center Friday evening with incandescent performances of music from the late 19th to the early 21st century, all of which were basically romantic in spirit.
Among the familiar pieces was Edvard Grieg’s Sonata No. 3 in C Minor, rich in heartfelt themes and lively with dance rhythms, which opened up the program. Fain, who studied piano before he took up violin when he was 15, told the audience how he had become “obsessed” with Grieg’s famous Piano Concerto. He managed to get his hands on the first few pages of the score and took it in to his piano teacher. “He said ‘Absolutely not! You’re going to hurt yourself!’ So I quit,” Fain said, adding that he’s still friends with his former teacher. Ernest Chausson’s moody Poème, originally for violin and orchestra but arranged for piano, rounded out the first half of the program. Fain delivered nuanced and sensitive performances of these late and very late romantic pieces, revealing an especially beautiful lower-register tone in the third movement of the Grieg. The partners didn’t seem quite together at times in the Grieg performance, and pianist Cory Smythe was a just a bit loud during both performances.
Starting off the second half of the program, Arches, written in 2000 by Kevin Puts, bristled with challenges and was the highlight of the evening. The piece is named for its structure – five symmetrical movements (Caprice, Aria, Caprice/Intermezzo, Aria, Caprice), the last four performed without pause. According to the program notes, the accelerating theme of the first Caprice was inspired by a scene in the movie The Red Violin (which is becoming a sort of cultural touchstone) in which, at the urging of his teacher, a young prodigy plays an etude faster and faster. The theme, which returned in the last movement, rose and fell in a series of arching figures. The second movement led into some jagged tonal terrain and some very eerie high-pitched themes. The central Caprice/Intermezzo demanded just about every resource a violinist has, including some bluegrass-gone-mad fiddling and left-hand pizzicato. It was an astonishing piece given an astonishing performance.
The tender Romance in F Minor by Antonin Dvorak was a lyrical interlude, and any troubles the partners seemed to have in the first half were gone. Fain’s high-tension-wire performance of Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane brought the program to a finish with a performance that crackled with electricity from its haunted beginning to its blazing finish. Let the wild dance begin!
For an encore, Fain and Smythe played a sweepingly romantic Sicilienne by the Russian-American composer Lev Zhurbin. All in all, it was a very rewarding and refreshing program from an impressive young virtuoso.
