Regular members of the San Diego Symphony audience have experienced both violinist Gil Shaham and pianist Orli Shaham performing as soloists with the local orchestra. As recently as February 2024, violinist Gil Shaham gave the West Coast premiere of Mason Bates’ Nomad Concerto with the Symphony under Music Director Rafael Payare. In 2016 he played the familiar Mendelssohn Violin Concerto under former Music Director Jahja Ling, who also led Shaham and the Symphony in 2014 in David Bruce’s unusual violin concerto titled Fragile Light.
In November of 2018, Orli Shaham played the extensive piano solo part in Lenard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety. But not until Sunday have San Diegans experienced the two siblings performing together: a smart duo recital at The Conrad under the sponsorship of the La Jolla Music Society.
In her introductory remarks, Orli Shaham noted that they designed the program to feature works from Leipzig composers—notably the Schumanns and Brahms—from the second half of the 19th Century, not, of course, that this school has suffered from neglect by performers of chamber music.
Gil and Orli gave Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor a commanding performance, unleashing the symphonic scope and drama of the composer’s powerful themes in his outer movements, while cultivating the intimate sighs of the transcendent “Adagio” and humoring the playful escapades of the lighter third movement. I appreciated how Orli gave such graceful shape and unfailing warmth to the composer’s most robust themes and textures, with Gil’s elegant descants floating above in perfect proportion.
Robert Schumann’s First Violin Sonata in A Minor, Op. 105, may lack the breadth of Brahms’ later Violin Sonata, but it projects a wonderfully dark and probing aura that the performers fiercely projected through its passionate counterpoint.
The program’s third sonata, Amanda Röntgen-Maier’s Violin Sonata in B Minor, brought this Swedish composer to my attention for the first time. Her three-movement sonata is replete with short, exuberant figures that flow with rhapsodic determination, and the work easily ingratiates itself to the listener. Amanda Maier wrote her sonata while a student at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she met Clara Schumann and Brahms. I was not surprised that my trusty Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music has no entry for Amanda Röntgen-Maier, although they devote several paragraphs to her husband, Julius Röntgen, a composer and pianist Amanda met and married while in Leipzig. Fortunately, Wikipedia devotes an informative article to this accomplished woman composer.
Music history proved kinder to Clara Schumann, perhaps because as a performer she became such a proponent of her husband’s works after his untimely demise. But only recently have Clara’s own compositions returned to the repertory, and the Shahams played her Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22, a work dedicated to Clara’s close friend, the great violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim.
Like Robert Schumann’s earlier Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 94, which the Shahams also offered on their program, Clara’s Romances sport ardent themes, often expressed in intense or affectionate dialogue between the players. The performers gave them elegant, persuasive interpretation, although these Romances should probably be classified as sophisticated Hausmusik, perhaps more rewarding to the players than to the listeners.
This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in downtown La Jolla.