Violinist's Unconventional Style Works

It's easy to see why Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg drives some musicians and critics nuts.

The violinist, whose performance of Brahms' Violin Concerto is the highlight of this weekend's Colorado Springs Symphony program, doesn't play for her peers: Her passionate, large-scale approach is aimed for the folks in the last row of the balcony.

Nor is she from the "let the music speak for itself" school. Instead, she ferrets out dynamic and rhythmic nuances that don't appear in Brahms' score. And she appears remarkably ill-at-ease on stage, even joining the violin section in the opening tutti because it simply gave her something to do.

She also is unquestionably one of the best violinists on the planet, a figure so charismatic and so extraordinarily musical that I'll unhesitatingly say this is the one concert this season you must hear to believe.

There was not one note in this interpretation that wasn't heartfelt and deeply thought out. Despite the wealth of detail, there was never any question where a phrase lies in the grand scheme of things. The overall shape was the most convincing I've ever heard in this sprawling concerto: The finale, which can sound flippant, here sounded like natural joy after the great weight of the slow movement had been removed.

This slow movement was the concert's high point, played with a sense of anguish so fragile, intimate and personal that I felt almost ashamed to be eavesdropping. Conductor Lawrence Leighton Smith and the orchestra especially distinguished themselves, following every subtlety in Salerno-Sonnenberg's rhythm.

Salerno-Sonnenberg's basic sound is neutral - a less adoring critic would call it undistinguished - but she gets an astonishing wealth of color. Her rhythm is expressive without ever becoming flabby, and details such as the pause just before the first movement's nostalgic second theme are deeply moving. With her powerful right arm, she spits out the finale's staccato theme with an intensity more typical of a fiddler than a violinist.

The only violinists remotely comparable to Salerno-Sonnenberg have been dead for decades. She plays with an emotional commitment and interpretive richness reminiscent of such figures as Eugene Ysaye, Carl Flesch and Fritz Kreisler, violinists just a generation or two removed from Brahms himself.

Salerno-Sonnenberg appropriately played no encore. When you've lived a piece as intensely as she lived this concerto, any change of pace would be jarring.

In most programs, it would be difficult to overshadow the orchestra's superb performance of Edward Elgar's "Enigma Variations," with which the concert began.

This picturesque piece - containing a gorgeously sorrowful theme followed by musical descriptions of Elgar, 13 people and a dog, who were close to him - is an orchestral showpiece that demonstrates how far the orchestra has come. A few years ago, I would have been surprised to hear the musicians deliver so many phrases with as vivid an expressive character and sense of assurance as they did last night. Now, I'm surprised when there's a prominent wrong note, as there was near the beginning of the great "Nimrod" variation.

Mark Arnest believes that the best way to cover the arts is to know them from the inside out. He learned about visual art from his father, Bernard Arnest, a prominent Colorado painter. His musical "All About Lowe" (co-written with his wife, Lauren Arnest, and Murray Ross) was premiered by University of Colorado-Colorado Springs Theatreworks in 1997. His farce "Maynard Dines IN" (co-written with Lauren) was premiered in July by the Maverick Players in Midland, Texas. His "Them and Meditations" for chamber orchestra was premiered by the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs in 2011. In a rare opportunity to make use of his degree in piano performance, he was a semi-finalist in the 2000 Rocky Mountain States Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs. And the 150-plus stories he writes from the Colorado Springs Gazette each year range from quick dailies to ambitious Sunday features.