Violinists Matsuyama and Kim

The host of this digital salon has said that he wants his guests to write about things that really excite us. In my case, I seem to be one of those eccentrics who get steamed up about performers and events they like. I'm the guy at the party who wants to bend your ear about the great thing he went to last week. That puts me at odds with the current taste for heated denunciations of incompetence, but it seems to be an unmendable flaw in my character.

The musician who made the biggest impression on me recently is Saeka Matsuyama, the violinist who played the leading role in Burch's Scottish Fantasy at the Astral Artists Rising Stars program. As I noted when I reviewed her February 2009 Astral recital, Matsuyama displays an impressive ability to move between widely varied composers and periods and capture the special nature of each one. Her 2009 recital included works by composers as varied and individualistic as Bach, Brahms and modern Poland's Witold Lutoslawski, and she slipped into the world of each one with the flair of a skilled actor who can immerse himself in half a dozen personalities in the course of a single one-actor play.

Everything but bagpipes

Bruch's Scottish Fantasy covers all the moods evoked by Scottish music, poetry, and history. It lacks bagpipes, but the rural fiddling in the second movement will rouse familiar feelings in anyone who has ever heard a bagpipe band play traditional tunes like The Road to the Isles-- the exuberant tramping song that celebrates the walk to Scotland's western shore.

In other sections, you can hear the lonely lament of the solitary piper, the appealing dream of romantic domesticity that runs through some of the best Scottish poems and songs, and the military traditions created by the legendary Highland regiments that stood their ground at Waterloo and formed the original "thin red line" at Balaclava.

Matsuyama handled all of it as if she thoroughly understood the appeal of every section. The Scottish Fantasy possesses a built-in ability to enchant audiences, but Matsuyama's extra insight turned a likeable piece into a spellbinder.

Yet another Four Seasons

The other musician who deserves some mention is another violinist with an impressive range. I've listened to Soovin Kim ever since he made his Philadelphia debut, 15 years ago, playing all of Paganini's Caprices in one session. Kim always manages to turn in a winning performance, even when tackling something as unpromising as my ten-thousandth exposure to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

In the last four weeks, I've heard him play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Chamber Orchestra and Kurt Weill's 1924 Concerto for Violin and Winds with the Curtis Chamber Orchestra. The Brahms requires a soloist who can truly blend with the orchestra. It's a concerto in which soloist and the orchestra are equal partners.

The Kurt Weill is scored for an unusual combination— a violin accompanied solely by winds and percussion— and it calls for a soloist who can work with the novel possibilities that Weil exploited. At times the soloist plays in front of unusual combinations, such as a trumpet and a thumping double bass, and at others he plays a subordinate role and accompanies a solo by a member of the orchestra. In both performances, Kim played his part like an artist who understands exactly how his role fits into the whole structure.

Soovin Kim's biography in the Chamber Orchestra program contended that he "has built on the early successes of his prize-winning years to emerge as a mature artist." As the author of that sentence recognizes, there's a difference between the technical proficiency that wins prizes and the insight that wins knowledgeable audiences.

Young orchestra, new name

Someone should say a few words, too, about the Symphony in C, which provided the orchestral backup for Sake Matsuyama and the other soloists on the Astral program. Symphony in C (formerly the Haddonfield Orchestra) is one of three "training orchestras" in the United States. Essentially, it's a subsidized orchestra that provides employment for young graduates of the leading conservatories while they pursue jobs with the major orchestras.

They're a lively, dedicated group, as you would expect, and they make a perfect partner for the promising young soloists Astral nurtures. They're led by Rossen Milanov, who fills this important post with all the verve he brings to his work as the Philadelphia Orchestra's associate conductor.