Concert Reviews

… In the final recital in this season's "Music & Museum" series, Eva Steinschaden, violin, and Alexander Vavtar, piano, presented themselves once more as the masterly and technically perfect musicians we have come to know and appreciate over the years.
Eva Steinschaden gave a convincing performance, clear, unsentimental and assured, the crescendo becoming more intense rather than louder. With his subtly differentiated touch, Alexander Vavtar has at his command an infinite variety of nuances, from a delicate impressionistic shimmer to the mighty tolling of a bell.
These musical qualities showed to advantage especially in Ludwig Nussbichler's "Traumbildfragment" III (2003) – the work opens with marked, even forceful chords which immediately retreat into a delicate pulsing, as though from a great distance. The violin opens the second part with a buoyant theme; it was a exciting experience to hear – not for the first time – how these two performers cause the piano and violin sounds to merge.
By contrast, Helmut Neumann's "Rosette" for violin and piano (1963) is as solid as a piece from a counterpoint manual. Its "robustness", abstaining from any poetic elements, was finely chiselled yet gently sketched by Eva Steinschaden and Alexander Vavtar with verve and tonal differentiation. Between Rosette and Traumbildfragment, the programme offered Schubert's sonatas in D major (D384) and A minor (D385) for violin and piano.
An excellently combined programme, in which the sobs in even these earlier, lighter-hearted Schubert sonatas were reflected most touchingly in the contemporary works.
(DrehPunktKultur – the Salzburg internet arts journal/Austria, July 2005)

{backbutton}