Thursday, August 1, 2013
Bartók: Violin Concertos Nos 1 & 2, review
Isabelle Faust (violin), Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, cond Daniel Harding
Harmonia Mundi HMC 902146, £15.99
Isabelle Faust, as she explains in her excellent booklet notes accompanying this CD, has a particular penchant for the violin music of Bartók, fostered by her studies with a violinist who knew the composer and then consolidated over the years through her performances of the sonatas and the concertos.
She has already recorded the sonatas (HMG 508334-35), and on this fine new disc she couples the early concerto, completed in 1908, with the later and more frequently heard one of 1938.
The First Concerto, published posthumously and given its premiere in 1958, opens with music that seems to be lost and rapt in reverie, a reflection of the fact that Bartók was deeply in love with the violinist Stefi Geyer, for whom the concerto was intended. The fact that she spurned it and also ditched Bartók adds a poignancy of its own to the long, seamless profession of ardour that he enshrined in the opening Andante and indeed carried through into the second movement, which is said to be a portrait of Geyer's gaiety.
Richard Strauss is still a strong influence on Bartók at this stage, in terms of orchestration, melodic sweep and little "Till Eulenspiegel" or "Ein Heldenleben" comic touches. Faust and the Swedish orchestra under Daniel Harding play and mingle the vying emotional facets of the music with a captivating sense of character, vitality, humour and longing.
By the time he wrote the Second Concerto, Bartók had harnessed folk music to his creative resources, and Faust finds an ideal tonal pungency to voice the folk-like intonations, whether fiery or wistfully fragile, which she allies to a natural sweetness and flexibility of timbre and phrasing. The orchestra is a potent force, too, in underpinning the rhythms and radiating colour. A compelling disc.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2f71f70e/sc/28/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cmusic0Cclassicalcdreviews0C10A2173430CBartok0EViolin0EConcertos0ENos0E10Eand0E20Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
