Midori is growing up fast. When I first heard her, I was stunned but cautious. The technique was prodigious, of course (isn't it always, these days?), but the complete musician had yet to emerge, the tone and manner carried infinite grace but little depth, ideas were not yet convincingly her own but born rather of so much received wisdom. I think it's time to revise my opinion.
Following her seamless line through the heady Andante sostenuto of the First Concerto, Bartok's untitled 'portrait,' of his intimate friend, the violinist Stefi Geyer, Midori understands so well the infatuation lying hidden just beneath the surface of this intricate polyphony. Her elevated tone and manner are at once extravagantly romantic and intensely private. This is where her playing has, for me, developed most: in its intimacy, its quietude. In the Second Concerto (or should I say the Concerto?) Bartok, the mystic, the dreamer, the nocturnal watchman, was never better served. Those sudden departures (a harmonic side-step perhaps on the eerie slide of a timpani glissando) to remote corners of the mind inhabited only by glacial strings, harp, and more often than not, celeste, take on a fragile beauty. The slow movement (and how gracefully she attends its long, enchanted melody) is more than ever a fairy-tale—but without the happy ending. Midori is wonderfully inconclusive about those final bars.
I need hardly add, though, that this isn't the whole story. There is the wild, fitful, turbulent side of Bartok's nature, too, and of that Midori is still too shy. This piece is nothing if not a study in extremes, a balancing act between major and minor polarities, passive and voraciously active forces. The tone is improvisatory, and the challenge to the performer is to lend purpose and logic to its sometimes elliptical thought processes. Perhaps there isn't yet the expressive range in Midori's playing, but the virtuosic extremes, the grotesqueries, the 'fireworks' here are brilliant but not in any wider sense gripping; they don't carry the stream of consciousness forward compellingly enough. If you take, for instance, that extraordinary passage of sliding quarter-tones just prior to the first movement cadenza and compare Midori with Kyung Wha Chung, it's the difference between academic and truly elemental.
In fact, Chung's reading for Solti is just about everything that Midori's is not: from the outset, the manner is highly extrovert, the colours primary, the pull from one idea to the next altogether more irresistible. It may not be as sheerly beautiful or as magical as Midori makes it, but it is more complete: Chung uses Bartok's huge palette of pyrotechnics to generate enormous emotional energy and Solti is a like-minded, like-spirited collaborator. For Midori, Mehta and the Berlin Philharmonic are all that they should be, sometimes more, watchful always of the score's textural poetry and drama. But if truth be told, they don't come within hailing distance of Solti and the LPO's high-octane brilliance. It's much the same story in the capricious second movement of the First Concerto. Chung and Solti (in Chicago for No. 1) give it more edge, more volatility—it's far more of a giocoso in their hands. But give Midori her due in the enraptured first movement: it is there that the wide-eyed romantic comes into her own. I appreciate Chung's directness—plain and simple, like a Bach fugue (which is effectively what it is), but Midori gives us more of the elusive subtext. Paradoxically, it is here more than anywhere that I sense another Chung in the making; but only time will tell. Final words on sound: and I have to say that these vivid, high-profile Decca recordings still upstage the well-adjusted Sony Classical which is good but not exceptional.'