Bernard Zinck: Live from France

Fanfare’s reviewer (that is, moi) found that the Society’s recent issue of the Szymanowski works for violin and piano, which offered Bernard Zinck’s disc début with pianist David Selig, “inhabit Szymanowski’s sound world with … unselfconscious ease … his effects are met with such effective, affective fluency that the ever-latent kitsch element dissolves in lyric warmth, and we are persuaded that this is great music after all… It’s not hazarding much to predict brilliant careers for both, and I’d be avid to hear them, separately or together, in whatever else they have at heart to offer us.”

La, voila! Live From Paris pairs Zinck with cellist Michal Schmidt in volatile early Kodály and late Ravel, fastidiously indelible even in this minimal combination, and laced with bitters. Substantial works, both, worth knowing and given with aplomb.

Zinck seems to have been a bit of a prodigy, though he did not enter the Paris Conservatoire (Gèrard Poulet’s class) until he was 16. Further studies with Glezarova and Milstein led him to Juilliard, where he is currently enrolled in a doctoral program. He pursues an active concert career here and in Europe, from which the present album is spun off. The Chaconne he may seem to have more in mind than at heart, though in eschewing virtuoso flourishes I believe he also wishes to mitigate and suaven the usual strident scraping which attends a more striving presentation. On the other hand, Ysaÿe’s great “Ballade” Sonata, one of a set of six, each dedicated to a famous violinist (the Third, heard here, to Georges Enesco), is given with a beguiling combination of bravura and finesse — though rather more of the latter — rising eerily in lyric lift to some towering moments which make one avid to hear what Zinck would do with the rest of the series. And that’s to say that this novelty-studded album makes us witness to the beginnings of an already adventurously brilliant career which anyone who cares for the violin as an instrument sui generiis will want to follow closely.

—Adrian Corleonis