FROM THE PRESS
SEATTLE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY, WINTER FESTIVAL, BENAROYA HALL
January 26 2014
Chamber music flourishes in Winter Festival
by Alice Bloch - SGN.org
If you're a music lover and you've never attended a Seattle Chamber Music Society (SCMS) concert, please do something about that as soon as possible. It really doesn't matter which concert you pick, because they're always splendid. I predict you'll be hooked for life, as I was in 1991, nine years after the late, great Toby Saks founded SCMS.
Saks's recipe for establishing and maintaining the stellar reputation of the SCMS festivals was all about excellence and balance. She discovered fabulous musicians, gave them great music to play, and made their time in Seattle so enjoyable that they wanted to return. She programmed each concert with a pleasing mix of old favorites, little-known pieces by well-known composers, and new compositions. Every season she added a gifted young musician or two to the mix.
In the mid-1990s, she introduced the insanely talented and charming violinist James Ehnes, then barely 20 years old. Several of Ehnes's equally accomplished cohorts soon joined in and infused the festivals with new vitality. I remember driving home from one electrifying concert during a summer festival that featured Ehnes, violist Richard O'Neill, cellist Bion Tsang, and pianists Wendy Chen, Jeremy Denk, and Adam Neiman, and thinking, 'In a few years all of them will be too famous to want to come back.' It took me a while to realize that there's no such thing as being too famous to want to come back to an SCMS festival.
A couple of years ago, Saks turned over the artistic directorship to Ehnes, who has proved a worthy successor. The January 26 concert that I attended was a good example of his smart programming and his ability to incorporate exciting new artists into the festivals.
Violinist Ruth Palmer, a newcomer to SCMS, blazed into the winter fog with a white-hot performance of the Bach Partita No. 2. This piece's concluding movement is the gorgeous, fiendishly difficult chaconne, which Palmer played with great skill and intensity.
Following the solo recital - have I mentioned that the pre-concert recitals are free and open to the public? - came a wonderfully satisfying concert of trios. Benjamin Beilman and Ida Levin on violin joined O'Neill for a delightful, rarely performed Terzetto by Antonín Dvorák. I hadn't heard Beilman play before and was very much impressed with his sweet, full tone, which Levin and O'Neill's rhythmic drive complemented perfectly.
Brahms's Piano Trio Op. 87, a larger, more serious piece, was beautifully performed by Ehnes, cellist Julie Albers, and pianist Max Levinson.
Some audience members left during the intermission that followed the Brahms, and they missed the pièce de résistance: Shostakovich's Piano Trio Op. 67.
The unforgettable performance of Palmer, Tsang, and pianist Rohan De Silva (a festival newcomer) brought out all the grief, sardonic humor, and ferocious anger of this momentous trio, which Shostakovich wrote in 1944 to commemorate the death of a close friend and, indirectly, the suffering of Russian Jews.
The works chosen by Ehnes for this concert illuminated one another, each piece preparing the listener to hear the next with greater understanding. Each includes a distinctive theme-and-variations movement (the final movement of the Bach and Dvorák, the second movement of the Brahms, and the third movement of the Shostakovich). Each contains dance elements and passages of exceptional rhythmic propulsion. Each demands musicians with courage, panache, and technical mastery. Well done, Mr. Ehnes.
You can sample the remaining concerts of the current festival, which runs through February 2, on KING-FM or king.org; but for chamber music, nothing matches a live performance. The communication among the musicians and between the musicians and the audience in the intimate setting of Nordstrom Recital Hall is remarkable. Sometimes the energy makes the walls bulge out. You have to be there.
OCTOBER 11, 2013, Peterborough New Hampshire, Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Jonathan McPhee
Rodger Martin
http://open.salon.com/blog/monadnock_pastoral/2013/10/11/the_sum_of_our_parts
Last Sunday afternoon, a Symphony New Hampshire concert in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a town of just over 6,000 souls, of which less than two hundred had gathered to listen to Beethoven’s Seventh, and a Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto might seem an odd place to ponder diversity. Particularly since New Hampshire’s unspoken concept of diversity is a wavy sort of nebulous shopping list that reads some thing like “We’ll have one each, but let’s not have many more than one of each.”
But this day, here in front of me was a finely tuned orchestra of faces which covered five continents, Antarctica being one exception and Australia the other—had heard them all converse, perhaps there may have been someone from Down Under there as well. But I didn’t hear them speak. I heard them play. What is about music that, when played well, erases the barriers of color, belief, and politics?
Here in front of me was a British soloist, Ruth Palmer, whose entire body channeled itself into a violin just to create the passions of sound a Russian composer heard in his head over a century ago. So focused, she was no longer in Peterborough, New Hampshire, but gliding on ballet slippers in some ethereal, tolerant place that music brings us to if we only listen. And it wasn’t just the audience enthralled, the orchestra too was enthralled, musicians smiling as she lifted them as well to that plateau beyond the Monadnocks where, as the maestro noted about Beethoven’s Seventh, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Oxford Theatre Review, Maira Seeley, May 2011
‘I was frankly surprised that everyone within earshot didn’t rush the gates.’ * * * * *
Hidden Acoustics: where music reveals architecture (Ruth Palmer)
The solemn fifteenth-century theologians who built the Bodleian’s Divinity School might not have approved of violinist Ruth Palmer’s exquisite concert there on Sunday night. After all, Bach’s partitas were originally dance music, and dainty minuets are probably not the purpose those men imagined for the room. Palmer, however, chose the Divinity School and the adjoining Convocation House as perfect spaces for Bach’s work in her concert series ‘Hidden Acoustics: where music reveals architecture’, described as a ‘ground-breaking solo tour, where music reveals startling acoustics, hidden in architecture that comes to life in programmes centred on Bach’. The acoustics revealed were startling: in the Bourree of Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E Major, I had the strange sense that the arches themselves were singing, an impression I confirmed afterwards with Palmer. While the Divinity School’s acoustics worked well with the mellower Loure and Bourree of Partita No. 3, the energy of the Preludio was swallowed slightly by the echoes in the long room which dimmed its usual brightness. It wasn’t exactly mushy, but the tiny lag time between the notes and their echoes dragged at the movement’s liveliness. Interestingly, when Palmer used a mute in the second movement of Eugene Ysaye’s Sonata No. 2, it seemed to give the sound far more definition, as though the mute somehow absorbed the conflicting echoes.
After the interval, we moved into the Convocation House for all five movements of Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Perhaps it was the wood panelling on the walls, or maybe the smaller size of the room, but Palmer’s sound was far clearer: the Corrente sounded precise and targeted, and every chord of the Ciaccona was bright and present. Palmer’s movements seemed so delicate and effortless in the Sarabanda that it felt as though the perfect sound were coming from some otherworldly dimension. How could such small movements produce such tone? She seemed to simply allow the notes to emerge, without laborious vibrato, and the pure sound made it easy to imagine the original gut strings of Bach’s day. It was a welcome contrast to Itzhak Perlman’s frenetic performance, which I’d listened to on Itunes while trying to pick up hints for my own attempts at Partita No. 2. Palmer’s performance of the Ciaccona was the sweetest incarnation I’ve heard yet, balancing huge chords with tiny, wondering comments from the tip of her bow, while upper and lower voices stayed distinct in the flowing whole.
Palmer continued her theme of Bach in unusual places for the encore. In the Bodleian’s quad, she braved the cold and faced the Earl of Pembroke for the Partita in G Minor. I was frankly surprised that everyone within earshot didn’t rush the gates. Perhaps they were simply waiting for a warmer opportunity: Palmer’s tour will continue in Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire on May 20th, as well as in Essex, at Calke Abbey, and at Chester Festivals. ‘Hidden Acoustics’ is clearly not to be missed.
Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post, 14 March 2011
You could have heard a pin drop among the 7000-strong Arena audience when Classical Brit Award winner Ruth Palmer took to the stage on Saturday. her sublime violin performances juxtaposed against the pomp of foot-tapping favourites like Grand March from Aida were just some of the delicious moments which made Liverpool's light-hearted answer to Last Night of the Proms such a treat to see . . . Violinist Ruth Palmer was a slight figure on stage but quickly had the entire Arena spellbound
Gypsy in her soul: Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Carlo Rizzi and Opera North
Friday December 5th 2008 Chris Robins Yorkshire Post, and 4th December Huddersfield Daily Examiner ****
THE London orchestral scene cannot better the Orchestra of Opera North at the moment, so if you missed it at Huddersfield, catch this concert when it is repeated at Leeds Town Hall on Saturday.
The sheer vividness, imagination and all round musical intelligence of the Orchestra under guest conductor Carlo Rizzi made this an extraordinary experience, and the balancing was revelatory particularly when woodwinds – at once incisive and fruity – were brought to the fore.
Sibelius’ Second Symphony is problematic – a work in which the composer’s symphonic style is under development rather than the finished article. Yet here it all made glorious sense, with Rizzi using its rhythmic motives and instrumental tone colours to build up forward motion.
The finale, in which Sibelius rather tied himself in knots, was the most convincing I have heard since Paavo Berglund and his Bournemouth Orchestra of the 1970s.
But Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, that old warhorse, was the most extraordinary performance of the evening. Soloist Ruth Palmer, on her home turf at Huddersfield, made it totally fresh and new. Her tone has tension and grit, pride and control. She is Carmen-like.
There is gypsy in her soul, and her little bendings of intonation and portamentos – some flirtatious in the first movement and others seeringly passionate – gave this structurally west European concerto its proper east European timbre.
All this, and she also plays more of the notes than most do, particularly in runny passages where she gives each note its due deference.
Robert Matthew-Walker, Musical Opinion, July 2007
A very large audience attended the Kirckman Concert Society presentation at the Wigmore Hall on 14th May, some no doubt drawn by the announcement a day or so earlier at the Classical Brit Awards that the young violinist Ruth Palmer had won the Most Promising Newcomer accolade on the strength of her debut CD of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto and Violin Sonata on the Quartz label. As in the Sonata on the CD, in her recital Ruth Palmer was accompanied but the Ukrainian pianist Alexei Grynyuk, who matched her artistry admirably.
This proved to be the finest violin and piano programme I have heard at the Wigmore Hall for a very long time. Ruth Palmer gave her most demanding programme throughout from memory, standing in the correct position relative to the piano, which is to say in the belly of the instrument, rather than the modern fashion , next to the pianist, facing the same way. Palmer's correct position enabled her tone to be protected towards the audience, not to the right-hand wall of the auditorium.
Palmer and Grynyuk began with Beethoven's C minor Sonata opus 30 No.2, and at once the superb and vital approach of these artists was compelling, the reading enhanced by a proper balance between the instruments. This was followed by Janacek's Sonata, an account rather freer than some to which we have become accustomed yet none the less highly convincing in its consistency and sympathy.
After the interval, Ruth Palmer played Bartok's great Solo Sonata, holding the large audience spellbound. Including those who my not have heard this challenging work before.
Finally, three of Brahms' Hungarian Dances, in the versions for Violin and Piano by Joseph Joachim, brought this immensely satisfying and deeply impressive recital to a brilliant conclusion.
Wigmore Hall - Anna Picard - The Independent on Sunday 4th April 2004
“Brilliant, bold and absorbed, Palmer played with glamour, engagement and entitlement; commanding her physical, and musical space, unfolding Barkauskas’s dazzling sequence with absolute tonal connection, rock-solid spiccato, taut pizzicato, muscular double-stopping, and a sure sense of drama. Strident, shocking, imperious and beautiful, this was a riveting performance and one that Palmer and Apekisheva built on in their visceral account of Schnittke’s Sonata No.2 “Quasi una Sonata”: an account of tremendous control and impact that flung Schnittke’s harmonies across the hall like cans of paint on a vast canvas. Palmer may look demure, but her musical heart is not.”
Wigmore Hall - David Alker - Musical Opinion July/August 2004
“With firm commitment from the start, violinist Ruth Palmer, in partnership with the fine pianism of Katya Apekisheva, brought intelligent and convincing contrasts to the first movement of Elgar’s Violin Sonata at their Wigmore Hall recital on 28th March. While the second movement offered extraordinary emotional breath with deeply sonorous sound, everything proved to be finely poised throughout the third. Debussy’s Violin Sonata was quickly immersed in an admirable style, the subtleties of its intermittently diaphanous landscape being carried imaginatively, while Palmer’s wonderful use of rubato in the Tres animee kept the drama flowing and poetically charged.
The second half was equally challenging, opening with Vytautas Barkauskas’ mesmerising Partita for Solo Violin, in which the capricious use of different violin techniques in the most modern musical dialect produced a deep and thoughtful work which deserves to become a staple of the violin repertoire. Ruth Palmer was a worthy champion. The contemporaneous mood continued with an awesome display of violin and piano virtuosity. Schnittke’s Second Violin Sonata Quasi una Sonata is loaded with unpredictability; the drama explodes and implodes as heavy chords, loud enough to wake the dead, are meted out. Here was a fabulous performance showing truly outstanding pianism against Ruth Palmer’s liberating violin playing of great stature.
Sadlers Wells - Louise Levene - The Sunday Telegraph 7th November 2004
Ramberts strong four part Sadler’s Wells programme began with Rafael Bonachela’s Irony of Fate, which was fuelled by Vytautas Barkauskas’s Partita played onstage by the superb Ruth Palmer. Amy Hollingworth inhabited the jagged, stuttering solo with manic self-absorption but good as she was, it was sometimes a struggle to concentrate on the dance when the violinist was so compelling.
- "white-hot...unforgettable performance" Alice Bloch, Seattle, SGN.org
- "she was no longer in Peterborough, New Hampshire, but gliding on ballet slippers in some ethereal, tolerant place that music brings us to if we only listen" Rodger Martin, open.salon.com
- "I was frankly surprised that everyone within earshot didn’t rush the gates." * * * * * Maira Seeley Oxford Theatre Review
- "You could have heard a pin drop among the 7000-strong arena audience" Liverpool Daily Post
- "the most extraordinary performance" ****
Yorkshire Post
- “Strident, shocking, imperious and beautiful, this was a riveting performance” Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday
- "liberating violin playing of great stature" David Alker, Musical Opinion
- "the large audience spellbound" Robert Matthew Walker, Musical Opinion
- "the superb Ruth Palmer" Louise Levene Telegraph
SEATTLE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY, WINTER FESTIVAL, BENAROYA HALL
January 26 2014
Chamber music flourishes in Winter Festival
by Alice Bloch - SGN.org
If you're a music lover and you've never attended a Seattle Chamber Music Society (SCMS) concert, please do something about that as soon as possible. It really doesn't matter which concert you pick, because they're always splendid. I predict you'll be hooked for life, as I was in 1991, nine years after the late, great Toby Saks founded SCMS.
Saks's recipe for establishing and maintaining the stellar reputation of the SCMS festivals was all about excellence and balance. She discovered fabulous musicians, gave them great music to play, and made their time in Seattle so enjoyable that they wanted to return. She programmed each concert with a pleasing mix of old favorites, little-known pieces by well-known composers, and new compositions. Every season she added a gifted young musician or two to the mix.
In the mid-1990s, she introduced the insanely talented and charming violinist James Ehnes, then barely 20 years old. Several of Ehnes's equally accomplished cohorts soon joined in and infused the festivals with new vitality. I remember driving home from one electrifying concert during a summer festival that featured Ehnes, violist Richard O'Neill, cellist Bion Tsang, and pianists Wendy Chen, Jeremy Denk, and Adam Neiman, and thinking, 'In a few years all of them will be too famous to want to come back.' It took me a while to realize that there's no such thing as being too famous to want to come back to an SCMS festival.
A couple of years ago, Saks turned over the artistic directorship to Ehnes, who has proved a worthy successor. The January 26 concert that I attended was a good example of his smart programming and his ability to incorporate exciting new artists into the festivals.
Violinist Ruth Palmer, a newcomer to SCMS, blazed into the winter fog with a white-hot performance of the Bach Partita No. 2. This piece's concluding movement is the gorgeous, fiendishly difficult chaconne, which Palmer played with great skill and intensity.
Following the solo recital - have I mentioned that the pre-concert recitals are free and open to the public? - came a wonderfully satisfying concert of trios. Benjamin Beilman and Ida Levin on violin joined O'Neill for a delightful, rarely performed Terzetto by Antonín Dvorák. I hadn't heard Beilman play before and was very much impressed with his sweet, full tone, which Levin and O'Neill's rhythmic drive complemented perfectly.
Brahms's Piano Trio Op. 87, a larger, more serious piece, was beautifully performed by Ehnes, cellist Julie Albers, and pianist Max Levinson.
Some audience members left during the intermission that followed the Brahms, and they missed the pièce de résistance: Shostakovich's Piano Trio Op. 67.
The unforgettable performance of Palmer, Tsang, and pianist Rohan De Silva (a festival newcomer) brought out all the grief, sardonic humor, and ferocious anger of this momentous trio, which Shostakovich wrote in 1944 to commemorate the death of a close friend and, indirectly, the suffering of Russian Jews.
The works chosen by Ehnes for this concert illuminated one another, each piece preparing the listener to hear the next with greater understanding. Each includes a distinctive theme-and-variations movement (the final movement of the Bach and Dvorák, the second movement of the Brahms, and the third movement of the Shostakovich). Each contains dance elements and passages of exceptional rhythmic propulsion. Each demands musicians with courage, panache, and technical mastery. Well done, Mr. Ehnes.
You can sample the remaining concerts of the current festival, which runs through February 2, on KING-FM or king.org; but for chamber music, nothing matches a live performance. The communication among the musicians and between the musicians and the audience in the intimate setting of Nordstrom Recital Hall is remarkable. Sometimes the energy makes the walls bulge out. You have to be there.
OCTOBER 11, 2013, Peterborough New Hampshire, Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Jonathan McPhee
Rodger Martin
http://open.salon.com/blog/monadnock_pastoral/2013/10/11/the_sum_of_our_parts
Last Sunday afternoon, a Symphony New Hampshire concert in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a town of just over 6,000 souls, of which less than two hundred had gathered to listen to Beethoven’s Seventh, and a Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto might seem an odd place to ponder diversity. Particularly since New Hampshire’s unspoken concept of diversity is a wavy sort of nebulous shopping list that reads some thing like “We’ll have one each, but let’s not have many more than one of each.”
But this day, here in front of me was a finely tuned orchestra of faces which covered five continents, Antarctica being one exception and Australia the other—had heard them all converse, perhaps there may have been someone from Down Under there as well. But I didn’t hear them speak. I heard them play. What is about music that, when played well, erases the barriers of color, belief, and politics?
Here in front of me was a British soloist, Ruth Palmer, whose entire body channeled itself into a violin just to create the passions of sound a Russian composer heard in his head over a century ago. So focused, she was no longer in Peterborough, New Hampshire, but gliding on ballet slippers in some ethereal, tolerant place that music brings us to if we only listen. And it wasn’t just the audience enthralled, the orchestra too was enthralled, musicians smiling as she lifted them as well to that plateau beyond the Monadnocks where, as the maestro noted about Beethoven’s Seventh, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Oxford Theatre Review, Maira Seeley, May 2011
‘I was frankly surprised that everyone within earshot didn’t rush the gates.’ * * * * *
Hidden Acoustics: where music reveals architecture (Ruth Palmer)
The solemn fifteenth-century theologians who built the Bodleian’s Divinity School might not have approved of violinist Ruth Palmer’s exquisite concert there on Sunday night. After all, Bach’s partitas were originally dance music, and dainty minuets are probably not the purpose those men imagined for the room. Palmer, however, chose the Divinity School and the adjoining Convocation House as perfect spaces for Bach’s work in her concert series ‘Hidden Acoustics: where music reveals architecture’, described as a ‘ground-breaking solo tour, where music reveals startling acoustics, hidden in architecture that comes to life in programmes centred on Bach’. The acoustics revealed were startling: in the Bourree of Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E Major, I had the strange sense that the arches themselves were singing, an impression I confirmed afterwards with Palmer. While the Divinity School’s acoustics worked well with the mellower Loure and Bourree of Partita No. 3, the energy of the Preludio was swallowed slightly by the echoes in the long room which dimmed its usual brightness. It wasn’t exactly mushy, but the tiny lag time between the notes and their echoes dragged at the movement’s liveliness. Interestingly, when Palmer used a mute in the second movement of Eugene Ysaye’s Sonata No. 2, it seemed to give the sound far more definition, as though the mute somehow absorbed the conflicting echoes.
After the interval, we moved into the Convocation House for all five movements of Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Perhaps it was the wood panelling on the walls, or maybe the smaller size of the room, but Palmer’s sound was far clearer: the Corrente sounded precise and targeted, and every chord of the Ciaccona was bright and present. Palmer’s movements seemed so delicate and effortless in the Sarabanda that it felt as though the perfect sound were coming from some otherworldly dimension. How could such small movements produce such tone? She seemed to simply allow the notes to emerge, without laborious vibrato, and the pure sound made it easy to imagine the original gut strings of Bach’s day. It was a welcome contrast to Itzhak Perlman’s frenetic performance, which I’d listened to on Itunes while trying to pick up hints for my own attempts at Partita No. 2. Palmer’s performance of the Ciaccona was the sweetest incarnation I’ve heard yet, balancing huge chords with tiny, wondering comments from the tip of her bow, while upper and lower voices stayed distinct in the flowing whole.
Palmer continued her theme of Bach in unusual places for the encore. In the Bodleian’s quad, she braved the cold and faced the Earl of Pembroke for the Partita in G Minor. I was frankly surprised that everyone within earshot didn’t rush the gates. Perhaps they were simply waiting for a warmer opportunity: Palmer’s tour will continue in Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire on May 20th, as well as in Essex, at Calke Abbey, and at Chester Festivals. ‘Hidden Acoustics’ is clearly not to be missed.
Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post, 14 March 2011
You could have heard a pin drop among the 7000-strong Arena audience when Classical Brit Award winner Ruth Palmer took to the stage on Saturday. her sublime violin performances juxtaposed against the pomp of foot-tapping favourites like Grand March from Aida were just some of the delicious moments which made Liverpool's light-hearted answer to Last Night of the Proms such a treat to see . . . Violinist Ruth Palmer was a slight figure on stage but quickly had the entire Arena spellbound
Gypsy in her soul: Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Carlo Rizzi and Opera North
Friday December 5th 2008 Chris Robins Yorkshire Post, and 4th December Huddersfield Daily Examiner ****
THE London orchestral scene cannot better the Orchestra of Opera North at the moment, so if you missed it at Huddersfield, catch this concert when it is repeated at Leeds Town Hall on Saturday.
The sheer vividness, imagination and all round musical intelligence of the Orchestra under guest conductor Carlo Rizzi made this an extraordinary experience, and the balancing was revelatory particularly when woodwinds – at once incisive and fruity – were brought to the fore.
Sibelius’ Second Symphony is problematic – a work in which the composer’s symphonic style is under development rather than the finished article. Yet here it all made glorious sense, with Rizzi using its rhythmic motives and instrumental tone colours to build up forward motion.
The finale, in which Sibelius rather tied himself in knots, was the most convincing I have heard since Paavo Berglund and his Bournemouth Orchestra of the 1970s.
But Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, that old warhorse, was the most extraordinary performance of the evening. Soloist Ruth Palmer, on her home turf at Huddersfield, made it totally fresh and new. Her tone has tension and grit, pride and control. She is Carmen-like.
There is gypsy in her soul, and her little bendings of intonation and portamentos – some flirtatious in the first movement and others seeringly passionate – gave this structurally west European concerto its proper east European timbre.
All this, and she also plays more of the notes than most do, particularly in runny passages where she gives each note its due deference.
Robert Matthew-Walker, Musical Opinion, July 2007
A very large audience attended the Kirckman Concert Society presentation at the Wigmore Hall on 14th May, some no doubt drawn by the announcement a day or so earlier at the Classical Brit Awards that the young violinist Ruth Palmer had won the Most Promising Newcomer accolade on the strength of her debut CD of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto and Violin Sonata on the Quartz label. As in the Sonata on the CD, in her recital Ruth Palmer was accompanied but the Ukrainian pianist Alexei Grynyuk, who matched her artistry admirably.
This proved to be the finest violin and piano programme I have heard at the Wigmore Hall for a very long time. Ruth Palmer gave her most demanding programme throughout from memory, standing in the correct position relative to the piano, which is to say in the belly of the instrument, rather than the modern fashion , next to the pianist, facing the same way. Palmer's correct position enabled her tone to be protected towards the audience, not to the right-hand wall of the auditorium.
Palmer and Grynyuk began with Beethoven's C minor Sonata opus 30 No.2, and at once the superb and vital approach of these artists was compelling, the reading enhanced by a proper balance between the instruments. This was followed by Janacek's Sonata, an account rather freer than some to which we have become accustomed yet none the less highly convincing in its consistency and sympathy.
After the interval, Ruth Palmer played Bartok's great Solo Sonata, holding the large audience spellbound. Including those who my not have heard this challenging work before.
Finally, three of Brahms' Hungarian Dances, in the versions for Violin and Piano by Joseph Joachim, brought this immensely satisfying and deeply impressive recital to a brilliant conclusion.
Wigmore Hall - Anna Picard - The Independent on Sunday 4th April 2004
“Brilliant, bold and absorbed, Palmer played with glamour, engagement and entitlement; commanding her physical, and musical space, unfolding Barkauskas’s dazzling sequence with absolute tonal connection, rock-solid spiccato, taut pizzicato, muscular double-stopping, and a sure sense of drama. Strident, shocking, imperious and beautiful, this was a riveting performance and one that Palmer and Apekisheva built on in their visceral account of Schnittke’s Sonata No.2 “Quasi una Sonata”: an account of tremendous control and impact that flung Schnittke’s harmonies across the hall like cans of paint on a vast canvas. Palmer may look demure, but her musical heart is not.”
Wigmore Hall - David Alker - Musical Opinion July/August 2004
“With firm commitment from the start, violinist Ruth Palmer, in partnership with the fine pianism of Katya Apekisheva, brought intelligent and convincing contrasts to the first movement of Elgar’s Violin Sonata at their Wigmore Hall recital on 28th March. While the second movement offered extraordinary emotional breath with deeply sonorous sound, everything proved to be finely poised throughout the third. Debussy’s Violin Sonata was quickly immersed in an admirable style, the subtleties of its intermittently diaphanous landscape being carried imaginatively, while Palmer’s wonderful use of rubato in the Tres animee kept the drama flowing and poetically charged.
The second half was equally challenging, opening with Vytautas Barkauskas’ mesmerising Partita for Solo Violin, in which the capricious use of different violin techniques in the most modern musical dialect produced a deep and thoughtful work which deserves to become a staple of the violin repertoire. Ruth Palmer was a worthy champion. The contemporaneous mood continued with an awesome display of violin and piano virtuosity. Schnittke’s Second Violin Sonata Quasi una Sonata is loaded with unpredictability; the drama explodes and implodes as heavy chords, loud enough to wake the dead, are meted out. Here was a fabulous performance showing truly outstanding pianism against Ruth Palmer’s liberating violin playing of great stature.
Sadlers Wells - Louise Levene - The Sunday Telegraph 7th November 2004
Ramberts strong four part Sadler’s Wells programme began with Rafael Bonachela’s Irony of Fate, which was fuelled by Vytautas Barkauskas’s Partita played onstage by the superb Ruth Palmer. Amy Hollingworth inhabited the jagged, stuttering solo with manic self-absorption but good as she was, it was sometimes a struggle to concentrate on the dance when the violinist was so compelling.