Music

Ilya Gringolts/Fali Pavri, RCS, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

Four stars

I WOULD not normally use the word “captivating” about Shostakovich’s 1968 Violin Sonata. Superficially it feels like an inappropriate description, unsuitable from almost any perspective. Yet, in an odd way, it exactly suited the nature and effect of the performance of the Sonata given on Friday in the Royal Conservatoire by Ilya Gringolts, International Fellow of Violin and Fali Pavri, a professor of piano in the Conservatoire.

The long, opening, un-harmonised melody on piano drew one in. When Gringolts added his voice, the music developed an aura of brooding soulfulness, shrouded with a sense of restraint. Nothing was overstated in the performance, which in fact seemed to increase the intensity of the music. I felt as though I had been sucked into the heart of the piece. Only when I felt my own heart pounding did I realise I was actually holding my breath. In that performance these two players had this listener by the throat. And that terse, ticking quality at the end of the movement, which just stops, although a familiar device in the composer’s armoury, is a bit scary when as effectively delivered as here.

The stomping, Scherzo-like quality of the second movement came as a release and a relief, though there are moments where you can feel Shostakovich is using you as a punch-bag. An extremely powerful performance by Gringolts and Pavri; and there was absolutely no letting-up in tension for their performance of Galina Ustvolskaya’s Duet, with its Psycho shrieks, violent, convulsive contrasts, and, at one point, a boiling sense of anger. I get the point of this music, but I do not like it.