JAZZ & BLUES
Markiyan and Oksana Melnychenko
Melbourne Recital Centre
Monday May 7, 2018
Markiyan and Oksana Melnychenko
One of the finest talents in Melbourne’s violin world, Markiyan Melnychenko is a delight to hear whenever he takes to the stage, whether in chamber works, as a soloist, or presenting a straight recital, as on this night when, once again, he worked with his mother Oksana through an hour’s music rich in variety: 14 movements with only one work expressly written for the violin/piano format.
I can imagine that, in his work at the Faculty of Music in the University of Melbourne (or the Conservatorium of Music . . . or whatever seasonal change in nomenclature is being applied this week to that amalgam of the white building next to the Grainger Museum in Royal Parade and the brick building next to the white building in St. Kilda Road), Markiyan would be an outstanding teacher. He has youth and enthusiasm on his side, and it doesn’t hurt that his technical ability shows no flaws, regardless of whatever the repertoire he engages.
But I’m not sure about the success of this partnership, simply in terms of the product achieved. Oksana plays with security and an obvious awareness of what her responsibilities entail, yet the collaboration impresses as uneasy; not exactly lop-sided but not far from it. On Monday’s program of incidental music by Korngold for Much Ado About Nothing, then four of Heifetz’s selections from Porgy and Bess, followed by the Ravel Violin Sonata, winding up with more Gershwin/Heifetz in the Three Preludes, the instrumental balance waxed and waned uncomfortably, to most obvious effect in the brilliant sonata.
The work began well enough, with a restrained dynamic on both sides, although the piano’s first left hand passage erred on the side of insistence rather than titillation. But climaxes like the build-up and arrival at Rehearsal Number 9 in the Durand score were keyboard-dominated, to the point where the violin’s 20 bars of tremolo were hard to discern for quite a while. Now, it’s well-known that Ravel didn’t go out of his way to give expression markings; hence, performances of famous works like this sonata, the G Major Piano Concerto and the Piano Trio contain whole pages where the interpreters have to work out their phrasing and attack style in mind-numbing detail and hold many moderation sessions concerning dynamics. It’s a matter of finding what works best for you and your partner(s). With this performance, it struck me that more needed to be done inside these parameters.
The following Blues promised well, Markiyan a deft hand with the pizzicato ten-bar introduction, and Oksana began sensibly enough, imitating the previous string chords, but the texture turned over-weighty a bar after Number 3 where the piano has the lead – for a while – and the subtle syncopations at Number 6 where the piano makes a virtue out of a silent first beat in pivotal bars came across as studied, not throwaway rhythmic flicks. The fortissimo marking at Number 9 which carries through for 25 bars before a triple forte mini-explosion proved wearing, a barrage where even the harmonic shifts failed to provide relief.
The Perpetuum mobile finale also opened effectively, Markiyan getting off to an engrossing start on his semi-quaver packed progress towards the final quadruple-stop chord. Throughout the movement’s main body, Oksana took the lead, mainly I suppose because the violin is busy following its relentless but increasingly exciting path while the keyboard has the motivic/thematic content. Yet the movement turned into a slog, the dynamic temperature at its peak fare too early and any sense of elation leached because of the prevailing inexorable dynamic. The occasional piano inaccuracy didn’t help.
In contrast, the Heifetz arrangements were much more successful. The great violinist played fair and gave his accompanist something approaching equal status, although he exercised his anticipated dominance with attention-grabbing octaves and harmonics. The Porgy and Bess excerpts began with Summertime – the most magical opening to an opera that I know. Oksana relished the moody chain of chords that underpin the solo soprano/violin, Heifetz taking delight in sharing the labour of Gershwin’s moving harmonic shifts across the last six bars or so.
A few octaves seem to be slightly ‘off’ during the episodic passages of My Man’s Gone Now, at about bars 15 to 18 but the reading held plenty of power. You might have wanted a less hefty approach at the centre of Bess, You Is My Woman where, in the opera, both singers come into duet but the final bars made up for any shortcomings with their splendid lyrical resolution. Most of the interest for It Ain’t Necessarily So fell on Markiyan’s faultless pitching even when ‘bending’ his notes in the best Cab Calloway fashion. It would have been a kind gesture to us Gershwin enthusiasts to perform the complete set of Heifetz arrangements with A Woman Is A Sometime Thing but we should be grateful that the Melnychenkos resurrected these four pieces that seem to have disappeared from recitals, even as encore materiel.
Gershwin’s Three Preludes, as Markiyan observed, have more Latin-American dance rhythms in their outer segments than jazz, but the central Andante is a great blues, one of the composer’s most simple and moving set of pages. These also, thanks to Heifetz, share the labour and these performers rollicked through them with enthusiasm. Oksana got the final bass note of the middle prelude wrong, quietly correcting it, but hit further trouble in the final Allegro‘s middle section where the insistent E flat minor tonality gives way to some fast chromatic creeping upwards which to these ears sounded uncertain in delivery.
As Markiyan admitted at the event’s opening, of the four works programmed, the Korngold pieces had least relevance to this recital’s title: you could find no jazz in them, and blues were out of the question. The composer’s neatly structured lyric Maiden in the Bridal Chamber made a mild start to the recital, although Markiyan’s finely curved melody line made its customary favourable impression. The March of the Watch (Dogberry and Verges) is meant to be musical mock-heroic comedy but gave the evening’s first inkling that, while one player was aware of the fun attached to the play’s base mechanicals, the other had a more aggressive take on the scene.
The Garden Scene was a specialty of Miki Tsunoda and Caroline Almonte in their Duo Sol days and is a finely-spun instrumental song with a ravishing passage in harmonics and an avoidance of sentimentality as witnessed by the aggressive mood before the final transformation of the main theme.; its old-fashioned Romantic heart-on-sleeve attractiveness made for one of this recital’s high points. As for the final Hornpipe, this was a bounding, athletic construct that could have come from a young Grainger with its happily exuberant echoes of British folk-music. Both players had no problems with these boisterous pages which they accomplished with generous breadth and accurate synchronicity.
O'Connell the Music 