Leonidas Kavakos/Yuja Wang review – high-level collaboration brings formidable interplay

Wigmore Hall, London
The two soloists are very different musical personalities but their programme - of Janáçek, Debussy, Bartók and Schubert - allowed them to share musical space to fluent and irresistible effect

The pairing of violinist Leonidas Kavakos and pianist Yuja Wang is a promoter’s dream – two big instrumentalist names on one concert billing. But such a combination does not guarantee an artistic slam dunk. Though each boasts technique to die for, Kavakos is essentially an introspective musician, Wang his polar opposite. Neither of these styles is any more valid than the other, but the enticing question in this Wigmore recital was how these musical personalities would combine in some of the most important works in the violin and piano repertoire.

The answer was dictated by the programme. Three of the four items – the sonatas by Janáček and Debussy, along with Bartók’s first sonata – were completed within a five-year span at the end of the first world war. The exception, Schubert’s C major Fantasy D934, needs no apology whatsoever and Kavakos and Wang played what is sometimes regarded as a purely lyrical work with considerable interpretative weight. It felt, nevertheless, as if the duo would have made greater impact with a contrasting violin sonata from the same darkly fruitful postwar period for the form (of which there are many, from Fauré to Hindemith) instead.

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