VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Art Club

Baichuan Hui (piano) and Huixin Hu (violin) are long-serving Chinese students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The significance of their duo programme on Wednesday, as part of Westbourne Music’s regular lunchtime concert series in Bath Street’s amenable Glasgow Art Club venue, was to celebrate in music the Chinese New Year – their “gift” on that very day to an appreciative audience.

As such, they included two works by representative composers – Shanghai-born Chen Gang and Sun Yiqiang – that illustrated, as you’d expect from that globalised port city, a fusion of Chinese musical sentiment and western influence. 

Beyond the ethereal scene setting of Gang’s Sun Shines on Tashkurgan a world of references erupted: gypsy-like dances flavoured with Ravel flourishes; folk allusions eventually engulfed by a torrent of dizzying occidental intensity. Yiqiang’s Spring Dance – neatly transformed by British composer Ben Lunn’s arrangement from its original piano solo status to one featuring violin and piano – maintained the Turkic inflexions of its Uyghur musical influences, yet also gravitated noticeably towards East European rustication.

There was no escaping the enthusiasm these two formative artists brought to their performances, creditable in the virtuosic flashpoints they felt most comfortable and musically confident with.  Where Gang’s music built up heads of rhythmic steam, Hu and Hui responded with convincing togetherness, a quality that, in the larger scheme of things, wasn’t always so obvious. Yiqiang’s Spring Dance, a piece laced with intoxicating textures, offered richer potential for subtlety despite some nervousness on the violinist’s part that materialised as periodic harshness of tone or uncentered intonation.

In a similar vein, the two mainstream works framing this recital – Beethoven’s Spring Sonata and Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No 2 – blew hot and cold. Where there was admirable optimism expressed in this bold view of the Beethoven, not least in the sprightliness of the Scherzo and frequent eloquent exchanges in the Adagio, the duo opened the work with somewhat overheated determination and a tendency throughout to misjudge the interchanges between lead and secondary roles. 

There was a sense, though, that they understood, therefore conveyed, the Beethoven more thoroughly and persuasively than the Prokofiev. Where was the sardonic allure that underpins the latter’s haunting opening theme, or more generally the opportunities to explore the shifting, often contrary, colours that embody the sonata’s mercurial drama? It was a performance that didn’t seem to ask the right questions, nor as a consequence find interesting answers. 

That said, flashes of witty conviction in the Presto and a gentle benevolence in the Andante served to stoke the fireside warmth (literally) in this pleasant city centre lunchtime oasis.

Ken Walton