As a voting member of the Recording Academy, a classical radio host, and a professional performer myself, I hear A LOT of music. In fact, music is my all day every day. And I hate to say it, but it’s getting more and more rare for me to be truly moved by something I’m hearing. 

That changed on Friday April 4th at the Mondavi Center, when Peter Dugan and Joshua Bell took the stage. I knew within the first three phrases of the opening Beethoven selection that something different was happening. 

It was the violin itself that caught me first.

It felt timeless, it felt like it KNEW. The instrument was speaking like it had been there. I immediately felt swept back into the actual lifetime of Beethoven, to an 18th century theater with an 18th century patronage, all hearing this music for the first time. Even the velvet curtains on the stage seemed to transform to an old dusty Viennese concert hall, horses waiting outside. I got chills. 

As it turns out, that violin HAD been there. 

I had no idea until later, but Bell plays a 1713 Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius. In other words, the instrument pre-dated Beethoven by 57 years. (The fact that Beethoven himself lived 57 years as well might be an aside that gives one a second round of chills.)

From then on I was spellbound. The mastery unfolding onstage wasn’t just world class, it was music set free from nerves, from pretense, from forced interpretations or arrogance… it was a window opening up into how we are meant to experience art as humans. Perhaps that sounds a bit hyperbolic, but as I looked around the (packed) auditorium and saw the faces full of serenity and awe, I knew everyone else was being uplifted the same way I was. 

When the Grieg began, something else special happened. I’ve heard this composer a thousand times, but this time Dugan in particular achieved such impossibly quiet tranquility in his cascading upper register, I saw the Norwegian countryside through the eyes of native Grieg for the first time. It wasn’t Davis CA anymore, it was a little trickling stream glinting in the sunlight, bright green grass all around, in some mountain village of Norway. 

This one captured the children in the audience as well. Where there may have been rustling and energetic little bodies before, suddenly even they were calm and still. The word enraptured springs to mind.

The standing ovations started about halfway through the program, before we even got to the herculean delivery of the Faure, or the incredibly charming and intimate little pieces from Bell’s childhood that comprised the multiple encores.

I’m grateful to Mondavi and CapRadio both for this concert. Everyone in attendance was given a singular gift and I was lucky to be there.