Charlie Siem, Violinist, at Le Poisson Rouge




The British violinist Charlie Siem, 25, has courted attention far beyond the standard classical music circles.


He has played for Lady Gaga. He has appeared in burnished black-and-white advertisements for Dunhill, the luxury goods company. In January he was seated next to the pop star Joe Jonas at the Calvin Klein men’s show in Milan.


His face — a handsome mixture of boyish softness and strong jaw — makes Mr. Siem a natural fit for the fashion world. And his stylishly snug suits are small miracles of tailoring.


There’s nothing wrong with marketing, or with building bridges between classical music and broader culture. But a musician needs to back up his promotional prowess with skill, and at Mr. Siem’s recital on Monday at Le Poisson Rouge with the pianist Kyoung Im Kim, there was a dumbfounding gap between his retro suavity and the ineptitude of his playing.


His intonation, passagework and tone were simply ugly in two works that are stale enough when played well. The first movement of Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 2 features flowing arpeggios that Mr. Siem labored over; in the elegiac second movement he lacked any discernible emotion at all. In the third movement, a folksy Sarabande, Mr. Siem teetered on the edge of charm but saved himself with the frigid calculation of his phrasing.


Dramatically spotlighted throughout the concert, Mr. Siem favored an equally dramatic effect: sudden drops in volume. But when he reduced his sound to a whisper in Vieuxtemps’s Concerto No. 5, it came out more like a rasp. His cadenzas had fitfulness rather than flair, and when he tried to sweeten his tone, it felt ersatz, closer to Splenda than pure cane.


Mr. Siem offered, as encores, more or less messy interpretations of three of the oldest tricks in the book: Kreisler’s “Caprice Viennois,” Heifetz’s transcription of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and Monti’s “Czardas,” the piece he played for Lady Gaga. As in the Vieuxtemps and Ysaÿe, there is not a lot of musical interest here, but there are opportunities for the kind of charismatic virtuosity that Mr. Siem lacks.


Many conservatory students in New York could have put on a more interesting and polished concert, even without a fancy suit.