Stand-in saviour back as star

Mark Kaplan combines a concert career with university teaching.

Two years ago, American violinist Mark Kaplan was the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's saviour when, at a few days' notice, he replaced an ailing Salvatore Accardo in a sterling performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

Tomorrow night, he returns, in his own right, with the Second Violin Concerto of Bela Bartok.

It was this work that got Kaplan his first break in 1975, standing in for Pinchas Zukerman in Cologne.

"Four weeks before the concert they asked me if I knew the concerto and would like to do it," Kaplan explains. "I didn't know it at all but said I did, rushed out, bought the music and worked like a fiend at it."

The concert was a success although, a few nights earlier, an impromptu busk outside the opera house to pay for icecreams at the cafe had unexpected results.

"There was someone from the newspaper there which meant an article the next morning," Kaplan says. "People lined up around the block for tickets and it became something of a media event - something you would hire a publicity agent to do these days."

Clearly, this is one of his favourite concertos, "written towards the end of Bartok's life when he was desperate to earn some money", Kaplan says.

"Like the Concerto for Orchestra it is much more audience-friendly than the pieces he was writing 10 or 15 years before."

Kaplan goes on to explain how the lyrical, song-like first movement is ingeniously transformed into a dance for the Finale; he admits that, like the popular Korngold concerto, this work can be lush.

"It even uses some of the same intervals in the beginning," he points out, "although it's not as much Hollywood as Korngold but a little bit more Budapest."

Kaplan muses on Bartok's tongue-in-cheek 12-tone row in the slow movement "done in such as way that it's very tonal. Bartok was a virtuoso composer and could do anything he wanted."

He also speaks glowingly of the original 1939 Zoltan Szekely recording of the work, and visited the the frail violinist in Banff just before he died in 2001.

"He had the original, unorchestrated score of this concerto and I noticed some of the pages from the middle were missing although he wasn't at all concerned. 'I'm sure they're around here somewhere,' was his reply."

Kaplan combines a concert career with teaching at the University of Indiana, one of America's most prestigious schools, "absolutely in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornfields", he laughs.