Robert Uchida; Philip Chiu – I Can Finally Feel the Sun

Robert Uchida was born in Toronto and is the Concertmaster of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. He studied with Andrew Dawes, among others, after whom he inherited an excellent 1770 Guadagnini violin, the “Long Tearse.” Obviously, it’s an inheritance he has taken on and deserved, given his remarkably limpid, crystal-clear and technically infallible playing. I Can Finally Feel the Sun is a journey through the artist’s musical loves, pieces that have the advantage of positively highlighting his excellent interpretative qualities but which are also intelligently arranged, like so many pieces of a single vast, coherent puzzle. 

Stravinsky’s Italian Suite resonates in the Suite for solo violin by Jean Papineau-Couture, a composer immensely indebted to the great Russian. This piece leads logically, in terms of texture, to one of Telemann’s 12 Fantasias (the 1st, in B major), closely followed by Canadian Murray Adaskin’s Baroque Sonatina for solo violin, a modern and elegant take on ancient musical architecture, imbued with refinement and charm, and including a quotation from the piece that immediately follows: the famous Prelude from Bach’s Partita for solo violin No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006. Uchida gives this masterpiece among masterpieces great transparency as well as impressive clarity in its timbral construction (magnificent campanella, or ‘bell-like’ resonances).

The romantic Eugène-Auguste Ysaÿe follows with the Prelude to the Sonata for solo violin, Op. 27, No. 2, ‘Jacques Thibaud’, inhabited by the ghost of the same Partita. His Prelude is actually entitled Obsession, and it’s easy to see why when you hear the snatches of BWV 1006 linked, turned, superimposed and blended with the Gregorian Dies Irae! Ysaÿe was obsessed with, perhaps, to the limits of sanity. Uchida details the voices with astonishing perfection, creating a manic dialogue between two entities of great symbolic power. 

The Debussy Sonata is a departure from the previous conceptual line, but it does not abandon the character and crystalline spirit of the musical playing, and above all the stylistic assurance of the discourse. Quebec’s Philip Chiu makes an ideal, sensitive and soothing contribution on piano. 

The programme ends with the premiere of I Can Finally Feel the Sun, the title piece by Carmen Braden, a composer from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories born in 1985. For solo violin, I Can Finally Feel the Sun is evocative of spring, like the English pastoralists of the early 20th century. It’s very pretty and kindly descriptive.

I’ll leave it to the composer to elaborate: I see the water running, the edge of the roof peeking out from under the snow; I hear the birds singing like a wild choir in the bushes; I smell the earth and squint, dazzled by a sky so bright I’d forgotten what shade of blue it is.

You just want to be there. 

A programme perfectly balanced between the ancient and the modern, the expressive and the reflective, and which serves as a standard-bearer for Robert Uchida’s exceptional artistic quality.