Here at DCist, we do not normally concern ourselves much with Baltimore, for obvious reasons contained in the name of this site. However, I do go up to Charm City regularly to hear concerts, and I mention things to hear there if they are exceptional. So, as I advised you all in last week’s Classical Music Agenda, on Friday night DCist Got In On It and heard the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Departing music director Yuri Temirkanov did indeed return from St. Petersburg for his final series of concerts in The City That Reads. With him this week was the extraordinary 22-year-old Munich-born violinist Julia Fischer, a sensation on recordings (her refined CD of Bach solo violin works has charmed many reviewers, including me). Nothing prepared me, however, for the joy and excitement that hearing her live would bring.

She came to Bal’mer to play a work of legendary proportions, monumental difficulty, and extraordinary significance for the career of any violinist, Ludwig van Beethoven’s violin concerto. It may be the most perfect example of the genre ever conceived for this instrument: it is certainly in the top three. As filled with power and emotional punch as it is, though, there are few pieces as excruciating to hear played poorly or even merely satisfactorily. Julia Fischer did what few performers can do for an obsessive listener like me: she refashioned my understanding of this piece, redefined my expectations of how it should sound, changed the soundtrack of that perfect performance that is always in my head as I listen to music that I know well. That perfect performance is not supposed to exist, except as an ideal, but here it nearly did. When Beethoven sent the violinist precariously high up on the bridge, Fischer’s tone almost never wavered from its sublime purity, the combination of a firm but not forced bow and flawless accuracy of left hand, which does not require heavy vibrato to cover slight mistunings.