Running 45 minutes long, with a 25-minute first movement that could be a whole work in itself, Beethoven's Violin Concerto is a monster of a work, Olympian in scope, intimidating and demanding.
Yet young violinist Benjamin Beilman did a lovely dance with the piece during Saturday's Wichita Falls Symphony Orchestra concert at Memorial Auditorium — one, sadly, that was poorly attended — and commanded it with such mastery of technique.
Beilman's style is very pure, clean and clear, and he smoothly moved through the concerto's passages, showing his technical mastery as he pushed the instrument through its whispers and its most vigorously objections.
What was most impressive in his Saturday night performance was when Beilman played those almost nonexistent whispers, as he did in the second movement of the Beethoven concerto. He plays so softly that the work sounded almost as if it were the fading part of an echo.
He easily took listeners with him to these quiet sighs on the violin.
But Beilman also is a musical attacker.
He stomped his feet, insistently, in the first movement as he ascended to the tippy-top of the high notes with such ease.
Beilman, with such insistent phrasing, wowed Saturday night's audience with such flash as his fingers moved at lightening speed up and down the strings and through brilliant, seemingly-impossible-for-a-mere-human vibratos.