{TABLE} Violin Sonata in G, Op 78.............. Brahms Violin Sonata in A, Op 100............. Brahms Phantasy Op 47......................... Schoenberg Violin Sonata in D minor Op 121........ Schumann {/TABLE} THE originally-advertised programme for Kyung-Wha Chung's Irish Times/NCH celebrity recital on Saturday included all three of Brahms's violin sonatas.
However, given the pallid playing of the two Brahms sonatas which made up the first half of this concert, the substitution of Schumann's D minor Violin Sonata for Brahms's in the same key felt to be a real gain, even if it meant that the programme lost the one Brahms sonata that Chung did not feature in either of her previous two recital appearances at the NCH.
After the placid and uneventful-seeming excursions of the first half, the temperature of the music-making rose for Schoenberg's late Phantasy of 1949 though, as in the Brahms, the style and argument of this gritty piece were more strongly presented through the piano playing of Peter Frankl than -through Kyung-Wha Chung's atypically understated manner.
The two players sounded altogether more at one with Schumann's impassioned sonata than they had in the Brahms of the first half.
At the end of the day, though, it was in a piece by Brahms, the Sonata movement in C minor, offered as the second of two encores, that Chung at last revealed the dynamism and incisiveness for which she is renowned.
