MUSIC REVIEWS : An Impressive Outing From Okumura

A long Monday evening at Ambassador Auditorium, with yet another guided tour through the mechanics of violin playing, seemed inevitable with the entrance of Tomohiro Okumura to project the formal rigors of Bach’s Sonata in A, BWV 1015.

But with the Baroque disposed of, Okumura, 23-year-old winner of this year’s Naumburg International Violin Competition, offered much more than the expected technical infallibility. He displayed the ability to color his smallish but admirably solid tone to suit the requirements of each subsequent offering as well as a degree of temperament initially obscured by his gawky stage presence.

The Japanese-born Okumura and Eri Kang, his strong, sympathetic partner at the piano, tore into the improbable convolutions of Bartok’s lengthy First Sonata with fierce abandon, but soon settled into exposing its myriad harmonic and dynamic subtleties with remarkable skill and insight.

Dispatching a pair of Paganini solo Caprices, the violinist combined bravura with ample wit, while in Saint-Saens’ D-minor Sonata, the tightly knit team turned on the Romantic juices, replete with delicately enhancing rubatos and violin slides, in the most fluently idiomatic Gallic manner.

The single encore, a Sarasate Spanish Dance, delivered with exquisite songfulness, left at least one listener hungry for more. But the audience seemed in a hurry to get home.