Schubert Rewards a Violinist’s Risks

At 29, Viennese violinist Wolfgang Sengstschmid pursues two risky goals. One is to play quietly. The other is to play seamlessly, linking phrases into long, spun-out lines.

The first created balance problems with the accompanist, pianist Daniel Grimwood, at the opening of the Jose Iturbi Gold Medal Series on Monday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Performing on a 1731 Guarneri del Gesu on loan from the Austrian National Bank, Sengstschmid ventured a lyric, light, even elegant voice often overwhelmed by Grimwood, 25, in Beethoven’s Sonata in D, Opus 12, No. 1.

Already, the violinist’s second goal raised danger signals: a sacrifice of pointed, shaped line; of going somewhere; of architecture; of personality.

This problem, even at higher volume, made Strauss’ Sonata in E-flat, Opus 18, a meandering journey without directed end points. The same was true in Kreisler’s “Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta,” subdued, nostalgic valentine to the composer’s native city.

But the risks paid off handsomely in Schubert’s Fantasy in C, D. 934, a sprawling late masterpiece.

Sengstschmid and Grimwood collaborated gorgeously in the magical opening murmurs, the long-arced themes that recall the shapes in the composer’s Ninth Symphony, the vivid folk dance that emerges seemingly out of nowhere and especially in the sudden seized-by-the-throat moment in which Schubert stops everything to reflect on a lost paradise. Nothing the two played reached this level again.