Violinist Oliver Neubauer makes a polished Kennedy Center debut for YCA
Oliver Neubauer performed Tuesday night at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. Photo: Shervin Lainez
Oliver Neubauer won first prize in the 2023 Susan Wadsworth Young Concert Artists International Auditions. The young violinist’s father is celebrated violist Paul Neubauer, who was in attendance at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater Tuesday evening to hear his son’s KC debut, presented by YCA. As heard last summer at the Marlboro Festival, Neubauer the younger has much more than family connections to recommend him.
Neubauer opened with Schubert’s Violin Sonatina No. 1, a piece so simple on the surface that a less experienced player could skate over its subtleties. The first twelve bars of the first movement, after all, is nothing but a unison melody marked piano. Neubauer and pianist Janice Carissa took their time with this lightish beginning, starting precisely together and shaping the line with fluid rubato and unity.
The tone of careful delicacy prevailed for all three movements, with both Neubauer and Carissa favoring the soft side of the dynamic spectrum, as if playing on gut strings and a fortepiano. The slow movement flowed with beautifully sculpted musicality, and the third movement bounced with an easy, gigue-like energy. Carissa, an elegant accompanist, was always in step with her partner, allowing him room to favor small moments with tender pauses along the way.
Last year, Neubauer began to play on a remarkable historical violin, made in Cremona by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù around the year 1727 and once played by Nathan Milstein. He showed off more of this precious instrument’s range in two bravura solo pieces, one before and one after intermission.
Bartók composed his Sonata for Solo Violin for Yehudi Menuhin in 1944. Neubauer gave a nuanced, profound interpretation of this monumental work, which he played from memory. In the first movement (“Tempo di ciaccona”), he placed excursions into the extremely high register with confidence, and the dissonant contrapuntal lines were impeccably in tune. Even with all the multi-stop challenges, the movement sounded with consummate lyricism.
In the second movement, Neubauer kept a strict consistency of articulation, which helped differentiate countersubject from subject as the opening fugal section unfolded. A folk music-like rhythmic freedom liberated some parts of the piece, especially as Neubauer unleashed some of the Guarneri’s louder end.
The slow fourth movement featured a lush unaccompanied melody, later restated in tricky double-stops spanning a tenth and often ornamented with trills. A motif in artificial harmonics stood out for its ghostly birdsong effect, capped at the end by a few notes with two artificial harmonics played simultaneously. The buzzing finale, played in the composer’s original version with quarter-tones (Neubauer played the composer’s original version of all four movements), proved a superlative tour de force, with a lusty dance section in the middle.
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich composed her much shorter Fantasy for Solo Violin as the compulsory work played by candidates in the 2014 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. Although Neubauer easily tamed the score’s daunting challenges, including some explosive off-string effects, he seemed less convinced by this mixture of the virtuosic and breezy, the latter especially in blues-inspired melodic writing.
If Neubauer has a vulnerable point in his arsenal, it is that his tone might be too demure for a broadly romantic piece like Richard Strauss’s youthful Violin Sonata, completed in 1887. Carissa, who returned to the keyboard for this final work, provided most of the overwhelming power, and she needed to hold back at times in consideration to the violinist. This approach made parts of the first movement more moonlit than vociferous, which provided its own pleasures.
Neubauer, in judiciously brief remarks about the program, admitted that he programmed the Strauss work because of its slow movement. Not surprisingly, he played it with intensely ardent tone. Carissa added most of the interpretative fire in the Appassionato section and produced appropriately Chopinesque flourishes in the right-hand decoration. The pianist also gave orchestral scope to the sonata’s brief closing movement, with its precipitous theme that seems to look forward to the composer’s Don Quixote, from a decade later.
A single encore, Fritz Kreisler’s melancholy Liebesleid, extended the program’s theme of the joys and pains of love.
For its 2025-2026 season, YCA presents concerts by cellist James Baik (September 30), accordionist Radu Ratoi (November 18), pianist Kiron Atom Tellian (March 31, 2026), and YCA on Tour (April 26, 2026). yca.org
