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Favored import
Dubravka Tomsic returns, plus a BSO program change and the Lydian Quartet
BY DAVID WEININGER

Any music scene will have its roster of local fixtures, those who not only perform in town but are embedded in the community, and Boston’s list is long and illustrious. Then there’s a slightly more amorphous group that might be called the "favored imports." These artists are based elsewhere, and they may perform all over, but their visits here are frequent and popular enough that they’ve all but worked their way into our native musical landscape. They almost seem, for lack of a better term, ours.

The Slovenian pianist Dubravka Tomsic is apt to be at or near the top of any Bostonian’s list. Although she makes her home in Ljubljana and plays worldwide, Boston must be a cherished destination: over the past year and a half, she’ll have been here three times, for two solo recitals and one BSO concert. And however frequently she plays, each concert remains an event rather than a routine visit that’s begun to suffer from overacquaintance (we could name names). If hers is a cult following, Boston seems glad to be among the devoted.

Part of the reason is that Tomsic has never really become a major international artist. Born in 1940 and a student at Juilliard in her teens, she was saved from having to return to Yugoslavia in the 1950s by the intervention of Artur Rubinstein, whose pupil she then became. Having returned home after her studies ended, she didn’t return to playing in the United States until 1989, and since then, she’s hovered around what one critic called "the margins of careerdom." She’s never recorded for a major label, and many of her recordings are only intermittently available.

All the same, as a musician she’s first-class. Like Rubinstein, she has a marvelous gift for line — what the Phoenix’s Lloyd Schwartz has called "an uncanny sense of continuity" — and for natural, unaffected phrasing, especially in Chopin, a composer who graces most of her programs. At her last Symphony Hall recital (April 2003), she played his Berceuse with such evenness and uniformity that the music seemed to rise out of the piano and through the room. Listen to her 2002 Liszt recording (on the IPO label) for evidence of the pinpoint clarity she brings to repertoire that’s often submerged in virtuosity. And then there’s the elusive yet essential matter of musical character. At the same Symphony Hall recital, her performance of Beethoven’s Opus 109 Piano Sonata had an off-the-cuff sense of fantasy, as if she were trying to draw out the work’s essentially heterogeneous nature.

She returns to Symphony Hall next Friday, courtesy of the newly renamed Bank of America Celebrity Series, in a program that opens with two Mozart piano sonatas, in G major (K.283) and A minor (K.310). Then it’s back to Chopin: all four of the Scherzi. That’s on October 8 at 8 p.m., and tickets are $32 to $57; call (617) 482-6661.

ELSEWHERE: The BSO has announced a program change in next week’s series of concerts featuring Charles Dutoit and Yefim Bronfman. Only Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances remains from the original program. The concerts will now open with Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye ("Mother Goose") instead of Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, and Bronfman will switch Second Piano Concertos, from Brahms to Liszt. He and Dutoit will be performing October 7, 9, and 12 at 8 p.m. and October 8 at 1:30 p.m. Tickets are $27 to $105; call (617) 266-1200.

And the Lydian String Quartet is beginning the fourth season of its exploration of "Vienna and the String Quartet." The Lydians must have covered quite a bit of ground in previous years, since their first concert takes them all the way to America, sandwiching Ives’s alternately solemn and uproarious Second String Quartet between Mozart’s D-major Quartet (K.499) and Schumann’s A-major Quartet (Opus 41 No. 3). That’s on October 9 at 8 p.m. at Brandeis University’s Slosberg Hall, in Waltham. Tickets are $20; call (781) 736-3395.


Issue Date: October 1 - 7, 2004
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