~ Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin
Thursday April 30, 2026 – On Thursday night I went to hear Midori play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. It was really as simple as that: she is one of the most meaningful musicians in my life and the concerto is one of the most beloved pieces of my twenty-five years of classical music listening.
Midori is noted not only for her transformation from child prodigy into sterling professional but also for her dedication to pedagogy and the generous, ambassadorial spirit she brings to her projects around the world.
One of those projects was a series of weeklong residences with orchestras in small American cities that involved workshops in schools, lunches and other social gatherings, masterclasses and performances with the local youth orchestras, and a concerto performance with the professional orchestra.
In April of 2008 Midori came to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I was a Lincoln High School junior, to perform with the South Dakota Symphony and hold one of these residences. For me it was a full week of practicing and going to rehearsals. I played in the two competing youth orchestras (the Sioux Empire Youth Orchestra and Dakota Academy of Performing Arts) and had been selected to play at Midori’s masterclass near the end of the week.
I played Fritz Kreisler’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, a bravura encore piece without much musical substance. I did a decent job but always struggled with intonation. I don’t remember much of Midori’s specific feedback to me besides her encouragement of my lyrical phrasing and warm vibrato. What I remember well was that, despite the sense of gravity that I felt playing while Midori stood on the stage nearby, I felt something totally different from the usual pit in my stomach that audiences and solo recitals induced. What I felt emanating from Midori was an overwhelmingly positive energy, perhaps a combination of general pride for the younger generation of violinists and a broad joy in the chance to play and discuss music together.
Midori wasn’t just modeling the technical prowess of a great violinist, she was modeling the kind of person a great artist could be.
The next day, a photo of Midori demonstrating for me (with me seen out of focus, from behind) graced the front page of the local paper, captioned with an absurd misspelling of my name.
Fast forward to this Thursday, when I brought a dear friend to hear Midori play Beethoven. An early point of bonding between my friend and me was the discovery that we had played masterclasses for Midori mere weeks apart (He played the much more substantive first movement of the Mendelssohn concerto in Great Falls, Montana).
At the solo violin’s first entrance—more than three minutes into the first movement—we hear Midori at her most Midori. Beethoven’s material here has an almost pedagogical quality with scales and intervals wending up and down the range of the violin. Midori gives each note light and air and we hear the deliberate action of every single pitch on the fingerboard almost like keystrokes. Her sound favors refinement over power and her readings are lyrical but understated.
The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, led by Masaaki Suzuki (the founder and director of the Bach Collegium Japan), matched Midori’s congeniality and buoyancy although there were many moments in each movement when her subtle effects were covered by the ensemble.
The second movement—which I will always associate with the music from the children’s dinosaur film The Land Before Time—had a beautifully veiled sublimity and reached a pinnacle of intensity (that drew clear connections to the overture to Don Giovanni on the program before the Beethoven concerto)in the moments before the attaca to the final movement.
In the Rondo Midori and the OSL relished the joyful, amiable, yet heroic quality of this Middle-Beethoven. Midori’s focused, introverted presence never prevents her from fully embracing the rollicking joy of music like this. The cadenzas (also by Fritz Kreisler) became perpetuum mobile exercises in brilliance and flawless left- and right-hand technique.
As an encore, Midori did what Midori does: she played a movement from Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin. Here was Midori the teacher offering us restraint, erudition, discipline, and perfection, like asking us to eat our vegetables.
~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin
Oberon's Glade 