Given the caliber of musicians who are invited to perform at La Jolla SummerFest, it is not easy to stand out in such accomplished company. Violinist Blake Pouliot, however, is the happy exception to that observation. A SummerFest regular since the 2021 season, the 31-year-old Canadian violinist retuned to The Conrad Friday to give a solo recital, accompanied by pianist Henry Kramer.
The two musicians assembled an atypical but clearly auspicious program: from standard repertory they picked sonatas by 20th-century giants Leoš Janáček and Sergei Prokofiev, complementing them with three contemporary selections that included the premiere of two commissioned works.
Opening with Chinese composer Bao Zhi Yang’s Ambush On All Sides, the duo made it immediately clear the evening would not be a polite survey of comfortable standards. Battle pieces—instrumental works that imitate the clash of armor in warfare—were popular in western music during the Baroque era, but Yang demonstrated that post-modern techniques are perfect for this genre. Ambush from Ten Sides (as it is sometimes translated) is based on a traditional pipa solo: Recital Series Lecturer Michael Gerdes stated the theme can be traced to the late 16th century. Yang’s virtuoso arrangement for violin and piano proved muscular and sonically explosive, and Pouliot dispatched its multiple brilliant mini-cadenzas with his customary panache.
I can never get enough of Janáček’s music. His operas are musically and dramatically compelling, but I have little hope San Diego Opera will stage them. So it was thrilling to hear Pouliot and Kramer tear into the composer’s ebullient 1914 Sonata for Violin and Piano. Because the composer had no interest in traditional sonata allegro form, he rocks back and forth from brash, rhapsodic swells to quiet, earnest chirps; from craggy, angular motifs to cheerful melodies that could be second cousins to the traditional folk tunes of Middle Europa.
Pouliot indulged in a gorgeous cantilena in the slow “Ballada,” based on an earlier composition that Janáček fused into his Sonata. Kramer pulled a rich, burnished sonority from the Steinway that he maintained even in the rowdy burlesque of the rapid third movement. The composer bravely ends his Violin Sonata with a slow movement that offers unanticipated glowing themes and dramatic juxtapositions, executed by Pouliot and Kramer with sophisticated phrasing that maintained the movement’s requisite transparent texture.
The two new works for solo violin, Derrick Skye’s the spark she left behind and Pirayeh Pourafar’s I Have Not Seen Butterflies Around Here, have roots in traditional Persian music. Dedicated to Skye’s late Persian grandmother, the spark she left behind offers a cantillation of opulent modal roulades suspended over a deep, sustained digital pedal point.
Pourafar’s piece employs a more complex digital component that includes percussion and an intoned Rumi poem in the original Persian. This composer also favors rousing violin flourishes, although half-way through the piece, insistent martial rhythms take over and propel it to the concluding recorded intonation that opened the work.
Prokofiev’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 80, is one of his signature compositions. Austere and rigorously constructed, the celebrated violinist David Oistrakh premiered the Sonata in 1946 and played it at the composer’s funeral in 1953. Pouliot and Kramer gave a bracing, probing account of the Sonata, fearlessly exploring its brooding strengths. Kramer’s muscular technical prowess propelled the piano’s complex excursions, and his range was complemented by Pouliot’s tonal breadth from glistening cantabile Iines to violent pizzicatos.
This program was presented by the La Jolla Music Society on Friday, March 14, 2025, at La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center.