Janet Sung: Edge of Youth
Sono Luminus

Violinist Janet Sung excels in any milieu, whether it be Bach and Berg or Dutilleux and Piazzolla. Yet while her command of the established repertoire is recognized, Sung's as celebrated for her championing of contemporary composers. She's presented world premieres by Kenneth Fuchs, Kenneth Hesketh, and Augusta Read Thomas, and a new violin concerto by the latter has been commissioned for her. That commitment to contemporary material is exemplified by Edge of Youth, which pairs 20th-century pieces by Benjamin Britten (Suite for Violin and Piano, 1935) and Georges Enescu (Impressions d'enfance, 1940) with short, single-movement works by Missy Mazzoli (Dissolve, O My Heart, 2011), Dan Visconti (Rave-Up, 2012), and Gabriel Prokofiev (Sleeveless Scherzo, 2007). Two settings feature Sung alone, while the others include superb accompaniment by pianist William Wolfram.

As key to the recording as its choice of material is, what stands out even more is Sung's exquisite playing, which mesmerizes throughout the hour-long presentation. A virtuoso who made her orchestral debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony at age nine and is currently Head of Strings and Violin Professor at the DePaul University School of Music, she possesses an unerring command of tone, vibrato, and pitch, and her playing on the recording is so riveting, one's attention is evenly split between the compositions and the musician bringing them to life.

In its dramatic sweep and breadth of moods, Enescu's Impressions d'enfance (Impressions from Childhood) offers an ideal vehicle for Sung's gifts. Written when the composer was sixty and designed to reflect impressions gathered by a child over a single day, the work runs the gamut of emotions, from ecstatic joy to openhearted sorrow. Sung's attack enraptures the listener immediately with her evocation of a Romanian gypsy violinist in “The Fiddler,” while playing in the highest of registers, she effectively simulates the joyful song of the living creature in “The Bird in the Cage and the Cuckoo on the Wall.” Noticeable shifts in mood and style occur, but transitions between the ten movements are camouflaged by the uninterrupted flow from one part to the next. Similar to Enescu's piece, Britten's Suite for Violin and Piano, written when he was in his twenties, explores rich emotional and stylistic territory, from the impish “Introduction” and stately “March” to the touching “Lullaby” and gleeful “Waltz”; at the work's center, Sung navigates the rapid waters of the “Moto Perpetuo” like it's the easiest thing in the world.

Originally composed as a duet between solo violinist and solo dancer, Prokofiev's Sleeveless Scherzo swings, like the Enescu and Britten works, between moods but does so in this instance with the rapidity of a person experiencing emotional turmoil. Mazzoli drew for inspiration for Dissolve, O My Heart from Bach's Partita in D minor for Solo Violin, but apart from a single direct quotation, Mazzoli's piece distances itself from Bach in moving beyond a plaintive, rather meditative first half for an increasingly agitated second. A markedly different tone seeps into the recording when Visconti's Rave-Up presents riffing of the kind one might otherwise hear in a blues band, Sung giving expression to her rawer side on a four-minute setting perfectly tailored for a concert encore.

June 2019