Many a violin recital with the usual touring-artist repertoire has all the excitement of hopping the 5:33 commute train to Burlingame.

Then there’s the one by Simone Porter, 21, a gentle, delicate woman from Seattle with a bow arm as powerful as on a cricket bowler. And with a great love for works of conflagrations and narrations.

Her program at the Conservatory was bristling with power and passion as she focused on music of narrative, flamboyance and dissent. Oh, my—I stuck around listening and just missed that Burlingame commute train. But no misgivings!!

Porter’s wide-ranging works represented two continents, six nationalities and four centuries. Her verve was epitomized by Esa-Pekka Salonen’s unaccompanied “Lachen verlernt” (Laughing Unlearned, 2002), a fiery, passionate brevity that is an implicit homage to Schoenberg’s “Pierrot lunaire.” It is technically difficult, with big leaps, and forays over the whole acoustic range, littered with double-stops, tremolos and broken chords.

For us the night’s high point lay in discovering Janacek’s  unfamiliar Violin Sonata (1914), written by a composer whose rage to life fostered an incredible late vitality. The opening in minor key featured moods between anger and anguish, with ideas tossed back and forth between piano and fiddle without a miss.

A serene lullaby theme in the following Ballad  is a respite before the slashing sforzato chords of the fiery, unstable Allegretto. After that, an astonishing concluding Adagio, with deft solos passages for the responsive pianist, Hsin-I Huang from Taiwan.

No less evocative was the soulful Jewish “Nigun” from the Baal Shem Suite by Ernest Bloch, who had served on the Berkeley faculty back in the mid-20th century. At the end—what else?—the incendiary gypsy fantasy “Tzigane,” in which Ravel eventually lets the piano get a few licks in as well. Porter and her Guadagnini violin make it sound like an entire gypsy orchestra, with the harmonics and the left-hand pizzicatos amplifying the all-out assault.

Porter’s play was self-confident, bordering on supreme, with explanations to boot, and great sensitivity; she could give a tutorial to rivals who trot out the same-old-same-old rep on tour. Her only misfire came in the excerpted arrangements from the Prokofiev ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” Just as in so many such extractions, whether it’s Porter-and-“R&J” or Herbert von Karajan with a “Swan Lake” suite, the segments almost never appear sequentially as in the drama. For ballet lovers it’s always a jolt—was the heroine really born AFTER her funeral??   And for an artist proud of playing a narrative sort of music, it’s a mistake.

The recital was given March 16 in the intimate auditorium of the S.F. Conservatory of Music, whose acoustics can be altered by adjustable curtains lining three walls of the stage. This was a true duo, with  Huang’s piano lid fully raised (and this time not lowered to a six-inch peg, muffling the piano sound).

Violinist Simone Porter in recital, under auspices of S.F. Performances. For SFP info: (415) 392-2545, or go online.

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