April 21, 1994

Review/Recital; A Violinist Tests Limits In Music Of Her Time
 By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

The history of the violin is partly a history of liberation: liberation from technical constrictions, styles, attitudes. Composers and players have always been challenged to push at the limits of this compact collection of wire and wood, to make it do something it has never done before. It was seen as the instrument of angels in the 18th century, of the Devil in the 19th, of the irrational and inexpressible in the 20th.

In a remarkable debut recital on Tuesday night at Merkin Hall, presented by the League of Composers/ ISCM, the nation's oldest organization devoted to contemporary music, Mari Kimura set about pushing virtuosically at any boundaries that might still exist. Ms. Kimura's teachers have included Joseph Fuchs, Roman Totenberg, Toshiya Eto and Armand Weisbord. She has studied composition with Mario Davidovsky at Columbia University and has played widely at international festivals. Her interest, though, is not in the traditional repertory, but in the most recent attempts at liberation from it. With a relaxed agility and a mastery of 20th-century bowing and plucking techniques, Ms. Kimura created a series of musical worlds at the border of the technically possible.

 The major promise of the recital was to reveal Ms. Kimura's "revolutionary bowing technique" that allowed her to sound notes a full octave below the instrument's G-string, reaching into the realm of the viola and the cello. This was an astonishing effect, used in the third movement of the violinist's own composition "ALT" (1992). Ms. Kimura bore down steadily on the G string in a way she cannot, even now, successfully describe, sounding particular pitches, including a low D sharp, a low A and a gravelly cellist's G on the bottom line of the bass-clef stave.

Researchers in acoustics, physics and electrical engineering at both Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to establish just how Ms. Kimura succeeds in producing these subharmonics (bow-hair tension, amount of rosin and the quality of the string affect the sound). She discovered the pitches while practicing Russian-school bowing exercises. Ms. Kimura did not use them for novelty's sake, but as elements in a sweet, ghostly composition meant to expand musical territory as well. She wrote in the program notes: "I wanted to free myself from the boundaries of Western musical idioms, associated with traditional violin literature, to reflect my own Japanese heritage in my compositions."

Other boundaries were also challenged. In two of John Cage's "Freeman Etudes," Ms. Kimura created a chilling performance that touched on the upper range of violin sound; Cage said he "wanted to move toward the impossible in order to show the impossible is possible." In a brilliant execution of "Six Capricci" (1976), Ms. Kimura made sense out of Salvatore Sciarrino's demonically difficult compositions, written almost completely for string harmonics. Berio's Sequenza No. 8 (1975) was given a gripping reading. And in another of her own compositions, "ECO III" (1993), Ms. Kimura hooked up a Zeta MIDI electronic violin to a computer and used it to alter traditional violin sounds heard on tape.

Toshi Ichiyanagi's "Omniscape" (1993) sounded more like a compilation of effects than a compelling musical statement, but it was a measure of the gripping integrity of the recital's performances that Mr. Davidovsky's Synchronisms No. 9 for violin and tape (1988) sounded almost conservatively charming. And when Ms. Kimura closed her recital with a skittish romp though a toccata for violin and player piano (1935) by Conlon Nancarrow, that experimentalist seemed a traditionalist.

Ms. Kimura is a virtuoso playing at the edge.