Nearly 100 years after the advent of electric recording, in 1925, how can a violinist of the young generation attract attention or go down in history, when masterpieces have been engraved by Jascha Heifetz, David Oïstrakh, Nathan Milstein and, closer to us, Itzhak Perlman, Anne-Sophie Mutter or Maxim Vengerov? The solutions often bring us back to the originality of the repertoire.
Several young violinists have recently taken on the immense Violin Concerto by Beethoven. Vilde Frang, at Warner, associates it with Concerto by Stravinsky and was conducted by a fellow violinist, Pekka Kuusisto. Surrounded by Simon Rattle and the London Symphony, Veronika Eberle, for her first disc, defends new cadences composed by Jörg Widmann. María Dueñas’ disc, on DG, benefits from the contribution of the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Manfred Honeck. His bet is to record a panoply of cadences as an appendix. Only a fourth thief, Charlie Siem, at Signum, engraved Beethoven “in the old fashioned way”, with the two romances in addition.
At the same time, and even more recently, three violinists from very different backgrounds have sought to draw attention to a work close to their hearts: the Violin Concerto of Britten for Kerson Leong, the Concerto by Geirr Tveitt for the Norwegian Ragnhild Hemsing and the Violin Concerto by Florence Price for Randall Goosby, accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. As if by chance, the three find themselves in competition, because they have chosen as their “loss leader” the famous 1er Concerto of Bruch.
A quarter century
In 1997, Hilary Hahn, a young 17-year-old violinist, published two partitas and a Bach sonata with Sony. With Hilary Hahn, two things will unlock. At the turn of the year 2000, all the major record companies will bet on female violinists. In the scenario that interests us even more, the recordings of concertos by Hilary Hahn are marked by iconoclastic couplings. Between 1999 and 2002, Beethoven was associated with Bernstein, Brahms with Stravinsky and Mendelssohn with Shostakovich. Janine Jansen (Decca) would rally to the method much later by coupling her fabulous Brahms with the 1er from Bartók and his remarkable Beethoven to an exceptional Britten.
Arriving at Sony just as Hahn leaves the label for DG, Lisa Batiashvili will continue the clash of styles and eras: Sibelius and Lindberg, Beethoven and Sulkhan Tsintsadze. The analysis and the wager are clear: Beethoven and Brahms can lead to listening and discovering something else. Avoiding a “usual” pairing also means avoiding a head-on comparison with the old ones.
Curiously, the reasoning leading to distinguish a recording by the singularity of the discographic proposal seems to evacuate the fact that there would be a margin to accord the musical language to our time. However, as we have already REMARKthe “historically informed” practice applied to the symphonic universe infuses little into the concertos.
It took Gil Shaham, that “old timer”, fired 20 years ago by DG by the artistic director at the time, Martin Engström, because the latter thought he had had his day, to modernize the approach to the score. In 2021, associated with the Knights, he took over from Mullova-Gardiner and Huggett-Mackerras to show that there is certainly a Beethoven of Ginette Neveu, Jascha Heifetz and David Oïstrakh, as there is an Acropolis and cathedrals, but that there is plenty of room for a Beethoven of our time.
This is shown, following Gil Shaham, by the Norwegian Vilde Frang in a recording which is worthy of its excellent proportions — the orchestra is the Deutsche Kammer philharmonie — and the freedoms in the orchestral accompaniment (ornamentation of the woodwinds in the 3e movement). Coupled with an excellent Concertoof Stravinsky, this novelty is relevant.
Veronika Eberlé, a great German violinist, wanted to mark the occasion with the use of new cadenzas by Jörg Widmann, clarinettist, conductor and very popular composer. But these creations overflow the framework and engulf the work. The cadenza is no longer a brilliant digression by the soloist, but an autonomous creation which comes to disfigure the concerto (3e movement).
María Dueñas, new star of DG, comes to us with a wonderful sound, her own cadenzas and a coupling that offers, at the end of the program, five historical cadenzas for the 1er movement. Manfred Honeck conducts the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein, and it feels like 1950 so everything is frozen in starched beauty. But, yes, it’s very beautiful and we walk in the footsteps of our predecessors in an imaginary reproduction of a lost world that is almost disembodied. Very remarkable discovery: the cadenza of Saint-Saëns that nobody plays.
Faced with so much luxury, Charlie Siem’s contribution could be negligible. But he has for him a little more than his quality as an Armani model and his presence in magazines recounting the happy days of well-born people (his wife is a Venetian countess, granddaughter of Henri d’Orléans, ex-claimant to the throne of France). In fact, Siem presents Beethoven’s concerto with gusto, without frills or fuss. But he is doomed by a Philharmonia routinely conducted by Oleg Caetani and captured by a lackluster sound recording.
In summary, even more than Daniel Lozakovich, the last violinist launched by DG in the niche of sound hedonism and associated in 2020 with Gergiev in Beethoven, María Dueñas will interest those nostalgic for a bygone era. Only Vilde Frang can however compete with Mullova, Tetzlaff, Jansen, Shaham. In short, those who bring a relevant contemporary look to this monument.
Trap Comparison
Regarding Bruch’s concerto (with a duration of 25 minutes, it’s more of a complement), the idea of coupling it to what is the main object of the disc is quite amusing, but can turn out to be “boomerang” .
After the success of Symphonies nbone 1 And 3 by Florence Price by Yannick Nézet-Séguin at DG, Price’s work for violin and orchestra by Randall Goosby at Decca would naturally have attracted attention, with additions taken from shorter symphonic pieces by the African-American composer. But the temptation was too strong to see the violinist hired by Decca in 2020 dubbed by the Philadelphia Orchestra and its conductor. benchmark to measure the sound and artistic banality of Goosby to the fervor of Ragnhild Hemsing and the class and power of Kerson Leong. Everyone will then gauge the criteria that now preside over the evaluation of artistic excellence leading to recording with Decca.
The objects of the publications remain. Addition to knowledge of Florence Price’s music, Goosby rated. It’s very well seen, well played, with two concertos, one of 28 minutes, one of 16 minutes. The latter, the 2e Concertofrom 1952, the recently recorded work, with more bite and sap, by Rachel Barton Pine (Cédille), deserves to enter the repertoire.
The music of Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981) is nourished by Norwegian folklore. Tveitt composed two Hardanger violin concertos, a violin comprising in addition to the traditional strings, underlying strings which vibrate sympathetically ensuring a particular resonance. Naxos has done a lot to popularize this endearing composer. The strong temperament of Ragnhild Hemsing, who chose the 2e Concertobursts into an exciting CD published by Berlin Classics and conducted, in Bergen, by Eivind Aadland.
After a very successful solo album Ysaye, the young Canadian Kerson Leong tries to find a place in the sun. It presents itself to us flatteringly recorded in the Concerto from Britton. The performance is admirable. Kerson Leong emphasizes a tight and generous vibrato ensuring at all times (as in his recent Tchaikovsky in concert) maximum sonic plenitude. But this sublime concerto of the XXe century, long neglected, began to have in a few years an exceptionally rich discography: Frang-Gaffigan, Jansen-Järvi, Vengerov-Rostopovitch, Ehnes-Karabits and Zimmermann-Honeck.
The difficulty that Kerson Leong may have, wisely accompanied, to make his voice heard despite his commitment and the quality of his proposal shows that the overabundance is now even spreading to repertoires once considered marginal.