This is violinist Graf Mourja’s second recital for Harmonia Mundi–and it’s my sad duty to report that nothing has really improved between the first and second round, even with the departure of pianist Elena Rozanova in favor of new partner Natalia Gous. This disc of Szymanowski and Stravinsky has a promising premise; after all, none of these works has suffered from over-exposure. But nevertheless, relative rarity doesn’t outweigh mediocre performances. In terms of artistic ripeness, the same problems remain: these performances are as square and brittle as ever. And sonically, the piano is still as aggressively forward as before. Part of that undoubtedly is due to the engineering, but certainly these musicians should take responsibility for this situation as well. Gous has a tendency to drum out her parts with an almost martial stridency (as in the first movement of Stravinsky’s Duo Concertante), while Mourja’s thin, feathery sound is drowned out.
Take, for example, even the brief introduction to Stravinsky’s Italian Suite–music well known to any fan of Pulcinella, as the composer adapted the ballet music for a chamber setting. Mourja enters with a weirdly bouncy, shuddering and stuttering bow that makes little contact with the string. If bowing is an instrumentalist’s breath, then Mourja is hyperventilating. And although the contact he makes between bowhair and violin string blessedly improves from this point, his dull, amorphous phrasing does not. All of Stravinsky’s sparkle is gone–and Mourja’s timidity in no way is mitigated by Gous’ performance (listen to her lumbering accompaniment to the Suite’s final movement).
Similarly, Szymanowski’s soft contours and sumptuous colors are utterly lost in these stilted, mannered readings. And whereas Gous does her best work in this realm, Mourja planes through the sonata’s Andantino with little regard to nuances of tempo or tone (though he at least matches her pace when asked to imitate her light, staccato eighth notes with pizzicatos). And in the Mythes’ Dryades and Pan movement, in which the violinist is charged with creating a portrait of the Dryades’ wild dancing, Mourja is utterly boring and unyielding. He never gives in to Szymanowski and gives us no reason to get swept up either. The only point at which Mourja relaxes slightly is in Szymanowski’s arrangement of Paganini’s 24th Caprice; clearly, there’s an element of familarity and comfort here that eludes him in the other works. But it’s a case of too little, too late–this is one disc that you may comfortably pass by.
