★★★☆☆
Siblings don’t always make for great partnerships, in music or elsewhere, but the revelatory recordings made by Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin (and reissued recently to celebrate Yehudi’s centenary) show how profound a sibling duo can be when the chemistry is right. Baiba and Lauma Skride are another violin and piano duo; Latvian sisters, the violinist Baiba rather more famous as a soloist. Although they don’t yet find the same transcendental qualities in the music as the Menuhins did, there’s an epic character to their playing.
Indeed, Baiba must be one of the most forceful violinists on the scene today, gifted with a big, lustrous timbre, a rock-solid technique and an appealingly forthright approach. Lauma seems the junior partner, mostly content to respond rather than initiate (very different from dominant Hephzibah’s relationship with Yehudi), but also capable of producing volcanic eruptions of sound where the music demands.
Which it certainly does in Carl Nielsen’s rarely played but psychologically fascinating Violin Sonata No 2. All the volatile conflicts and incongruous outbursts you find in the great Dane’s symphonies — and particularly those anarchic disruptions by the drummers — are pre-empted here in microcosm. A deceptively docile, almost domestic atmosphere is increasingly torn apart by violent episodes, until the sonata is brutally terminated by the pianist hammering repeated B flat octaves.
The Skride sisters rose to those challenges admirably, which made for a dramatic conclusion to this BBC lunchtime recital. I wish, however, that they had used some of this Baltic-orientated programme to display gentler musical qualities. Sibelius’s Four Pieces, Op 78, for instance, are virtually salon numbers and would have benefited from more sugar and sentiment than this businesslike interpretation allowed. It was certainly possible to imagine a more floaty approach to the extended rhapsody of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Summer Thoughts.
No quibbles, though, about the way the Skrides tackled Maza vasaras muzika (Little Summer Music) by their distinguished compatriot Peteris Vasks. When they cut loose in these Bartók-like folk-influenced miniatures the sense of abrupt, raw excitement was compelling. Just as impressive was Baiba’s ethereal, edgy timbre in the elegiac slow movement. The title might mention summer, but to me that movement evoked the murky wintry world of all those enigmatic Nordic crime dramas we lap up on TV.