A young violinist on an autumnal journey through Brahms
CAMBRIDGE - The conductor Benjamin Zander has his own personal canon of music that seems always close at hand - such as the symphonies of Mahler - but he also has the luxury of avoiding other repertory staples until the time is right. Zander had not programmed the Brahms Violin Concerto for 25 years, he wrote in an e-mail, because he had not found the violinist he thought was right for the job. That changed after he recently heard the young Chinese soloist Feng Ning. Here, finally, was his man.
Zander signed him up and Ning, 28, appeared for three concerts this past weekend to open the Boston Philharmonic’s season. The Brahms naturally had pride of place on the program, coupled with Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony. I caught the final performance on Sunday afternoon in Sanders Theatre.
Ning has not yet made a name for himself in this country; the main item on his resume is winning the 2006 Paganini Competition. But he played the Brahms beautifully, showcasing a wonderfully fluid technique and a mature sense of musical intelligence. All of the first movement’s major statements, those iconic moments that come to mind when someone mentions the Brahms concerto, were persuasively dispatched but I found even more compelling the unaffected care and warm singing tone he brought to much of the transitional material, those passages that other soloists often rush through on their way to the next big entrance. It helped him project a larger expressive arc, a sense of the integrity of the journey. The slow movement, nicely introduced by oboist Peggy Pearson, was elegantly poised, and the finale had coiled intensity and pure adrenaline in rich supply, even if there was a bit of push and pull between soloist and orchestra.
As his first encore, Ning gave an astonishing rendition of Paganini’s knuckle-busting variations on “God Save the King,’’ casting fistfuls of left-hand pizzicato into the hall with the seeming ease of scattering sand on a beach. Then came a hushed, dazzling account of Francisco Tarrega’s guitar work “Recuerdos de la Alhambra,’’ in the arrangement by Ruggiero Ricci. But after a work as noble and sincere as the Brahms, these purely gymnastic encores rang a bit hollow, suggesting that alongside the mature artist in Ning is still the young competition winner eager to impress. A movement of solo Bach, or one of its spiritual descendants, would have told us more about him as a musician, and without breaking the spell of an autumnal masterpiece.
After intermission, Zander led the orchestra in a rhapsodic, hard-driving account of Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony, with enormous quantities of sound and energy radiating from the stage. The musicians were thanked with a fervid ovation. The impact would have been greater still if the climaxes had been given a bit more space to build, the music more room to breathe.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com. 
