Music: Making the Strings Sing Again

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The twin obstacles in the path of contemporary music are the past and the recent past. In the violin repertoire, the beloved romantic concertos have maintained such an iron grip on audience affections that even indisputable 20th century masterworks have been neglected in favor of the millionth performance of the Beethoven, Brahms or Tchaikovsky concertos. It has not helped that some compositions of the '50s and '60s amounted to teeth-grinding assaults on the instrument that made both soloists and audiences recoil.

But times are changing, and not a moment too soon. "The violin is being looked at again as a great singing instrument," says Virtuoso Isaac Stern, 65. "It is no longer being beaten, plucked, forced and squeezed." Perhaps as a result, the American orchestral scene has lately been a festival of new violin concertos.

During one five-week period last winter, the Philadelphia Orchestra offered the world premieres of challenging concertos by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Richard Wernick. In New York City in February, Elmar Oliveira gave the first performance of a lyrical new work by Hugh Aitken, while in Montreal, Stern contributed the North American premiere of French Composer Henri Dutilleux's impressionistic concerto. The same month Virtuoso Shlomo Mintz played Marc Neikrug's neoromantic concerto for the second time, having presented its world premiere in 1984. And this week Sergiu Luca will give the American premiere of William Bolcom's frisky new concerto in Pittsburgh (he introduced it in 1984 in Saarbrucken, West Germany).

"It is terrible to live under the onus of playing only masterpieces," says Luca, who has a small one in the Bolcom. "If I am able to enjoy the work and can convince someone else that it is enjoyable, then it's worth playing."

Bolcom's concerto is indeed that. The composer is probably better known as the peerless accompanist for his wife Mezzo Joan Morris in their programs of American popular songs. But his spacious cantata on Blake poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, was in contention for 1985's Pulitzer Prize for Music and should have won. The concerto, although on a smaller, less ambitious scale, is typically eclectic in its welding of disparate musical materials into a distinctive, stylish whole. There is a vigorous first movement, which tips its hat to the opening of the Bartok Second Violin Concerto, a haunting, elegaic slow movement inspired by a mournful tune Bolcom heard whistled on the New York City subway and a riotous finale that is an homage to the late jazz fiddler Joe Venuti. Bright and accessible, the concerto is steeped in a popular idiom. "You don't have to tell people what it means," observes Luca, who is Rumanian born and Israeli raised. "The wonderful thing about playing it is that it is analogous to Mozart playing his works in Vienna. It is part of the lingo."