KEY POINTS:
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.
Musical life at the school is rich enough with upwards of 1150 concerts a year, but an apartment in New York means "we can go there when we feel the need for bad air, noise and good music".
As a player, he considers himself "one of the eclectic school which means you do everything" but the contemporary is high priority.
Two weeks ago he played the Philip Glass Concerto in Spain and he also does concertos by Adams, Ligeti, Maw and Nono.
"This music is closest to us philosophically because it's from our time and that's something that many musicians don't give themselves a chance to find out. We spend so much time learning Bach and Beethoven."
On stage, Kaplan has a loyal companion in his violin, a 1685 Stradivarius which he has played for 23 years.
"You hold it very close to you and there is a certain kind of emotional attachment. It's a beautiful object but at the same time it's a tool which is a much more prosaic thing.
"A violin-maker once said to me that these instruments are basically wooden boxes that resonate. True, but at the same time, they're so very much more."
* Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, Auckland Town Hall, Thursday 8pm
