For as long as I can recall, the La Jolla Music Society has offered a Piano Series among the various performance and lecture series the organization presents each season. Although La Jolla has never offered a violin series, if Artistic Director Leah Rosenthal could assemble a few more violinists with the skill and charisma of Guido Sant’Anna, I predict a Violin Series will be added.
The 19-year-old Brazilian violinist, winner of Vienna’s 2022 Fritz Kreisler International Competition, played an astonishing recital with his piano collaborator Henry Kramer Sunday at The Conrad. Only a few minutes into the duo’s opening selection, Ernest Chausson’s lush Poème, Op. 25, it was clear that Santa’Anna was communicating more than mere stellar technical finesse, and that his connection with Kramer was indeed electric.
Chausson wrote Poème for the famous violinist Eugène Ysaÿe as a single-movement tone poem for violin and orchestra, although he also made a violin and piano version which was used when Ysaÿe premièred the work. Sant’Anna revealed the breadth of Chausson’s emotional palette from austere, mysterious yearning to voluptuous, rhapsodic cascades, and Kramer matched his command and sumptuous timbral range.
The sophisticated structure of Maurice Ravel’s Sonata in G Major for Violin and Piano proved an ideal vehicle for this duo. While the opening movement dazzled with their deft articulation and playfully precise antiphonal thematic development, they were careful to take Ravel’s “Blues” movement on his own terms, rather than finding more American jazz influences than the composer suggested. Their “Perpetuum mobile” finale was a ravishing exercise, a perfect segue to Igor Frolov’s Concert Fantasy on Themes of ‘Porgy and Bess.’ Like Liszt’s opera paraphrases, this Fantasy not only evokes the memories of Gershwin’s inimitable themes, but presents them in inventive contexts replete with technical panache.
Earlier this weekend, Jeremy Denk opened his piano recital with a Romance by Clara Schumann, so it was fitting Sant’Anna and Kramer continued this trend playing Clara’s three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22. Her sense of balanced structures and engaging melodic development proved her chief virtues, and this duo gave sumptuous accounts of these Romances.
Franz Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major for Violin and Piano is not frequently programmed, perhaps because its slender structural framework is not up to the riches of the composer’s melodic invention. In any case, Sant’Anna and Kramer gave an exhilarating account of the Fantasy that clearly pleased the audience at The Conrad.
For an encore, the duo offered a charming Fritz Kreisler bauble.
This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society on January 12, 2025, at La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center.