By Daniel Buckwalter
We all live for those unexpected treasures tucked inside otherwise ordinary days, which often resonate for days afterward. Those gems glow, and they make you wonder why there can’t be more of these golden lights guiding our way.
Take, for instance, the pair of recitals held back-to-back on the evening of July 30 at Tsunami Books in Eugene, featuring the expressive elegance of violinist Kara Eubanks and the explosive command of pianist Andrei Andreev.
It was all enough to make the audience at Tsunami — a full house — forget the doldrums of a blistering summer.
First there was Eubanks, who moved to Eugene in 2015 with her husband so that he could take a position at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance. Eubanks is now teaching there, in addition to teaching at the Willamette Violin Academy, which she founded, as well as touring the United States as a soloist and chamber musician.
I heard her perform a recital in the spring, and her selections are always eclectic. She takes her audience on a musical trip around the world, and this Friday evening performance was in much the same vein. There was Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Spring Sonata,” music from Mexican and Polish composers and, finally, work from Austrian-American composer Fritz Kreisler.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to hear Eubanks play — and she is a semi-regular at Tsunami — I would encourage you to do it. Her precision and ability to draw out the music’s character is first rate.
And she does it with a light touch, engaging her audience between selections and often using props to help illustrate a point (at Tsunami, of course, she read passages from a book).
After intermission came Andreev, and this, for me, was the revelation of the night.
Andreev is a Kyrgyzstan-born pianist who made a name for himself in Russia and came recently to the United States, via friends in Creswell. He studied at the UO and teaches in Roseburg.
However unique the trip — and I hope to learn more — the south Willamette Valley and southern Oregon is lucky to have him.
The man was flat-out riveting on this Friday night, scorching the keys in three of Beethoven’s sonatas (Nos. 1, 17 and the “Fantasia” Sonata in G minor). I was fortunate to sit diagonally behind him, and Andreev’s work on the keyboard was priceless for me to watch. It was truly astounding.
At the end of his performance, he was greeted with the standing ovation he deserved, and suddenly, my spirits (and I suspect the spirits of everyone in attendance) were lifted a little.
That Friday-night performance will linger for awhile, and it is my hope that Tsunami Books will hold another set of these recitals in the near future.
