With Perlmans, Zuckermans, Lins, Midoris, Shahams and Bells already on hand, and scads of other first-class fiddlers popping up even as we speak, we truly live in a golden age of violin playing.
Classical music lovers are blessed by an embarrassment of riches. Not only have impeccably high standards become the norm in concert halls, but the repertoire has expanded as well. After all, you can't perform the Beethoven Concerto every night.
And how many Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos do even the most rabid violin aficionados need in their CD collections?
The expanding repertoire means concertos heard once in a blue moon years ago, including those by Dvorak, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and the American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981), are becoming standard concert fare. And what wonderful news that is for classical music lovers!
For most of his creative life, avant-gardists dismissed Samuel Barber as a treacly, neo-Romantic reactionary whose works were thought to be hopelessly out of touch with 20th-century sensibilities.
But the aesthetic tables have turned. To its enduring credit, the public has decided that dissonance for the sake of dissonance is no fun at all, and that music that warms and inspires is nicer than music that sounds, ad infinitum, like a cat jumping up and down on your piano keys.
Enter the Sam Barber revival, and not a moment too soon. Thomas Hampson and Cheryl Studer sing his songs to great critical acclaim. The orchestras of Detroit, St. Louis and Baltimore can't record his symphonic music fast enough. And his lush, lyrical 1949 Violin Concerto is quickly becoming part of the standard repertoire.
That's good news for Israeli violinist Uri Pianka, who will play the Barber concerto this weekend at Maryland Hall with Gisele Ben-Dor and her Annapolis Symphony. The program also includes Beethoven's Fourth Symphony and selections from Leonard Bernstein's "On the Town."
When Mr. Pianka, concertmaster of the excellent Houston Symphony, takes his 1704 Rogieri violin in hand this evening and next, he'll be returning to an old friend.
"I played the Barber concerto after winning the Juilliard violin competition my final year there," he said. "I didn't perform it again until just last year in Houston. I found I still had great fondness for it. Barber went and made expressive music that is very pleasant to the ear. Sometimes, it seems to me that it's such a nice piece I don't think I can spoil it!"
Spoiling anything musical would be highly unlikely for Mr. Pianka, who has excelled across the musical spectrum. The Houston Orchestra, whose string section he leads, has exploded into the ranks of America's great orchestras under the direction of its superb conductor, Christoph Eschenbach.
Mr. Pianka has performed the concerto repertoire with many of the world's greatest conductors and is also one of our most adept chamber players.
With his Yuval Trio, he has recorded works by Dvorak, Smetana, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mendels sohn on the CBS and Deutsche Grammophon labels.
Though the Yuval Trio is now defunct, Mr. Pianka continues to perform the repertoire with the Houston Symphony Chamber Players, an ensemble made up of the orchestra's solo principals. One of the ensemble's members, French horn player William Ver Meulen, wowed concert-goers here two seasons ago with his eye-popping virtuosity in performances of Mozart, Rossini and Strauss with the ASO.
The appearance of a soloist of Mr. Pianka's caliber shows that Ms. Ben-Dor's earlier association with the Houston Symphony continues to pay rich dividends for her current orchestra.
The ASO performances with Mr. Pianka will be held at 8 p.m. today and tomorrow at Maryland Hall.
Ticket information: 269-1132.