German-born violinist Isabelle Faust, who has an impressive new Beethoven CD out, has built her career almost entirely in Europe.
Classical music
Isabelle Faust may be the best - and certainly the most extensively recorded - young violinist you've never heard of. At age 35, she has a sweeping discography that would be the envy of almost any early or mid-career soloist. An excellent recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and the "Kreutzer" Sonata on the Harmonia Mundi label is the most recent addition. Listen to it and the question immediately arises: Where has she been?
The answer is that the German-born Faust has built her career almost exclusively in Europe, where she is a known soloist who has played with many premier ensembles. Her debut this week with the Boston Symphony Orchestra will be her first appearance with a top American orchestra. It's tempting to point out that serious-minded European players often take longer before hitting the North American orchestral circuit - and can be better off for it - but the truth may be as simple as Faust sorely needing better US management. I have never heard her perform live, but her steady stream of discs, wide-ranging in repertoire and refreshingly free of glam photography and frothy marketing copy, suggest an eloquent, mature artist with an extremely refined technique and the musical instincts to use it wisely.
She has shown a deep commitment to 20th-century music, having performed concertos by Gyorgy Ligeti and Morton Feldman, Karl Amadeus Hartmann and André Jolivet, among others, and it's notable that her BSO appearance this week comes not in a standard concerto with a guest conductor, as has been the case for almost every other violin soloist this season, but in the rarefied company of pianist Peter Serkin and James Levine, with whom she will play Berg's Chamber Concerto. The only other guest violinist to perform with the BSO under Levine this season - or last - is the brilliant soloist Christian Tetzlaff, with whom Faust has collaborated in chamber music.
As with Tetzlaff, or Serkin for that matter, Faust's comfort with more modern musical languages means that, when she does look to the well-trod past, she can do so with a certain freshness and penetration of vision. You can also hear that she has absorbed some insights from the world of period-instrument performance, especially in regard to pacing and the use of vibrato, but she is not bound by them. All of these qualities inform her playing of the Beethoven Concerto, in which she's handsomely partnered on this new disc by the Prague Philharmonia under Jiri Belohlavek.
The tempos in the outer movements are relatively brisk and unsentimental, and Faust's playing is notable for its dynamic control, subtlety of articulation, and distinctive use of rubato. She approaches Beethoven's deep-breathing slow movement with great sensitivity, at times floating notes with a pure and almost flute-like tone, all the while keeping the focus on meaningful exchange with the orchestra rather than soloistic preening. In the thrillingly virtuosic "Kreutzer" Sonata, the dialogue, this time with the fine pianist Alexander Melnikov, has a visceral intensity and a rhetorical clarity that make this reading stand out in a very crowded field.
This week's work, the Berg Chamber Concerto, with its unmoored harmonic language - not strictly 12-tone but feeling the pull of that distant planet - presents a daunting set of hurdles to any violinist. It has all the technical demands of a Romantic warhorse without the big cresting tunes to coast in on. Color, nuance, and inflection become all the more crucial in this context. If the recordings that precede her arrival are any indication, Faust should be equal to the challenge, and with Levine and Serkin as her collaborators, listeners receptive to the cool, crepuscular lyricism of Berg's music should be in for a treat.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
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