Violinist Augustin Hadelich returned to The Conrad on Saturday with a bracing recital program of French music. The acclaimed German-American musician’s last La Jolla visit occurred during the SummerFest 2024, when he and composer Thomas Adès performed Janáček and Adès.
But San Diego music aficionados have been enjoying Hadelich’s passionate, sophisticated musicianship for some time. In the years prior to Covid, he regularly performed concertos with the San Diego Symphony and San Diego’s Mainly Mozart Festival.
On Saturday’s recital, Hadelich performed with pianist Francesco Piemontesi, a duo of laudably congruent musical virtues. Their bracing account of Francis Poulenc’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, especially their exhilarating chase through the opening “Allegro con fuoco” and the surging finale “Presto tragico,” revealed the duo’s sleek merging of brilliant technical display and a keen sense of the composer’s witty neoclassical style. In the sonata’s center movement “Intermezzo” Hadelich conveyed the poignance of the composer’s languid themes, cradled by Piemontesi with elegiac finesse.
If Poulenc slightly favors the bristling piano part of his Violin Sonata, Debussy’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor is more of a showcase for the violin, notably the rococo roulades and pizzicato excursions of the movement marked “Fantastique et léger.” Hadelich’s gleaming, refined sonority gave Debussy’s final composition an apt valedictory aura.
César Franck’s exquisite Sonata for A Major for Violin and Piano is understandably over programmed by recitalists, so Hadelich and Piemontesi wisely chose a more introspective approach to the work, saving the fireworks for the finale, which they executed with fervor and insight.
The sole program offering outside of the French tradition, György Kurtág’s Tre Pezzi, Opus 14e, brought an austere minimalism to the recital, sparse textures and deft gestures that Erik Satie would have appreciated.
The duo’s encore: an instrumental arrangement of Francis Poulenc’s song “C.”
This recital was presented by the La Jolla Music Society in La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center on March 21, 2026.