The perfect bowman for a venerable Stradivarius shows his stuff

Since Vadim Gluzman became custodian of the 1690 Stradivarius, the Ukrainian-born violinist has visited our shores.

Vadim Gluzman with the Melbourne Symphony. Picture: Daniel Aulsebrook

In the 20 years since Vadim Gluzman became custodian of the 1690 “ex-Leopold Auer” Stradivarius, the Ukrainian-born violinist has regularly visited our shores, performing with nearly every state symphony orchestra.

Now, finally, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has the pleasure of Gluzman’s company, his current Australian tour comprising performances of Brahms’s heroic Violin Concerto, in Geelong and Melbourne, followed by four SSO concerts featuring the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.

Chief conductor Andrew Davis opened the program with a pleasant English amble through Shakespearean-inspired soundscapes: the MSO joining a multitude of arts organisations offering quadricentennial tributes to the Bard of Avon, by presenting pieces inspired by his literary creations.

Commissioned for the occasion, Hollow Kings by Australian composer James Ledger is in four movements, each dedicated to a flawed monarch, as depicted by Shakespeare: Macbeth, Henry VIII, Richard III, King Lear. Pre-recorded extracts, read with Olivier-esque plummy intonation, delve into the psyche of each character, while a skittish orchestral accompaniment serves as jarring incidental music. Rising awkwardly above the symphonic rumbles and jitters, a solo electric guitar buzzes with tinny disembodiment, Ledger’s program note proposing this as a modern substitute for the ubiquitous lute of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

What ultimately emerges from this nervy pastiche is the brilliance of Shakespeare’s dramatic voice, and its capacity to completely upstage the composer’s art.

With its dappled colouration, breezy abstraction and emotional flurries, Berlioz’s choral symphony Romeo et Juliet certainly transformed Shakespearean drama into novel musical expression, being neither opera nor cantata and allocating Shakespeare’s key dialogues and soliloquies to the orchestra rather than voices. Here, Davis presented reordered orchestral excerpts from Part 2 — the work’s romantic core — with muted fluency, softening Berlioz’s moonlight passion into gentle idyll and skipping lightly through the Queen Mab scherzo, before an animated account of the Capulet festivities.

Technically faultless, Gluzman demonstrated impeccable balance between power and delicacy in the Brahms, adroitly following its oscillations between raging intensity and faraway lyricism. With exceptionally even bow contact — very much in the Russian tradition — he calmly draws a majestic tone from his historic instrument and shapes musical ideas with clarity and assurance, never falling into the futile arrogance of virtuosic flourish. Having drawn the first movement forth as a single, monumental thread, the cadenza weighty and lush, his treatment of the Adagio avoided sentimental excess, instead following a gentle arc of steady introspection and silky meandering. A glittering account of the third movement’s zipping runs and jubilant outbursts sustained excitement from first note to last, an unlaboured orchestral accompaniment and refreshingly spontaneous solo line making for a exuberant finale.

Gluzman Plays Brahms; Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; Hamer Hall, Melbourne, June 25. Vadim Gluzman performs again in Melbourne tonight, then Sydney on June 29, July 1, 2 and 4.