Review: Joshua Bell delivers a virtuoso performance at Minnesota Beethoven Festival

Why Winona? What is it about that quaint little Mississippi River city in Minnesota’s southeast corner that inspired superstar violinist Joshua Bell to help launch the first Minnesota Beethoven Festival in 2007, then return several times over the course of the next 18 years?

To hear Bell tell it, he simply loves the festival, a sentiment he reiterated from the stage of a Winona State University concert hall Sunday afternoon while performing a sold-out recital with pianist Peter Dugan. Bell may be a globetrotter who lives in New York City and spends a lot of time in London — where he’s music director of one of the world’s great chamber orchestras, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields — but he called Winona “one of my favorite places to play.”

And his affection for the festival was matched by his enthusiasm for the repertoire he performed Sunday afternoon, as he and Dugan proved remarkably simpatico collaborators while squeezing every drop of romantic fervor from sonatas by Johannes Brahms and Gabriel Fauré before Bell reasserted his place among the pantheon of historic violin virtuosos with awe-inspiring encores from the pens of Henryk Wieniawski and Pablo de Sarasate.

Despite his claims of being slowed by age, the youthful 57-year-old showed that he might actually be at the peak of his powers, his interpretations deeper and more complex and the technical skills on his fiery showpieces as jaw-dropping as ever.

It being the Beethoven Festival, the concert opened with that composer’s Second Violin Sonata. Bell and Dugan tossed short phrases to and fro as if playing a musical game of “Marco Polo” in the opening movement, then drew the audience in like expert balladeers, finding in the music a spirit both buoyant and troubled.

Far more tragic in tone was Brahms’ Third Sonata, which veered from anxious introspection to thunderous anguish. Its Adagio was suitable for a cinematic scene of lovers bidding one another farewell and its finale explosive and breathtakingly intense.

Bell’s been spending a lot of time with Fauré lately, marking the centennial of the composer’s death by presenting that French romantic’s chamber music with partners like cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Jeremy Denk. His commitment to this music came through clearly on Fauré’s First Violin Sonata, Bell’s body language suggesting the same kind of striving for transcendence that could be heard in his playing, the violinist weaving from one set of tiptoes to the other.

But Fauré gave much of the sonata’s best music to the piano and Dugan obliged with flowing shifts of mood and phrases full of yearning.

Because Dugan made a violin sonata sound as if it were written chiefly for piano, Bell then appropriately took a piano piece — Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat Major — and delivered his own arrangement of it for violin and piano. It was marvelously emotive, especially when Bell ascended into his instrument’s stratosphere, his tone remarkably pure and resonant.

And in case any audience member held doubts about this violinist’s ability to astound with the kind of feats of instrumental derring-do that only a handful can accomplish with such aplomb, such feats blazed forth during Wieniawski’s Scherzo Tarantelle and an encore of Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen.

With a new concert hall under construction in downtown Winona, here’s hoping that Bell helps open it next summer with a recital as exciting as Sunday’s. He said he’d love to, if they’ll have him. Odds are they will.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

When: Through July 20.

Where: Most concerts are at Page Theatre, St. Mary’s University, Winona.

Tickets: $25, available at mnbeethovenfestival.org.