A Violin for All Seasons - Vivaldi & Panufnik / Little, BBC Symphony Orchestra
Chandos
SACD
$10.99$21.99Save 50%Oct 28, 2016
Encapsulating the voluptuous sound of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s strings, Tasmin Little is both the soloist and conductor in this unique coupling: Vivaldi’s ever-popular ‘Four Seasons’ meets Roxanna Panufnik’s ‘Four World Seasons,’ the premiere recording of a set of highly inspirational pieces. As a complete cycle, ‘The Four Seasons’ offers a set of vivid tableaux, imaginative, enticing, and wonderfully contrasted, with ample chance for the violin soloist to display technique, sensitivity, and color. These are qualities that the British composer Roxanna Panufnik also sought for her own Seasons tribute, Four World Seasons, written for the violinist. Three of the pieces are dedicated to her, while the fourth, ‘Autum in Albania,’ is dedicated to the memory of Panufnik’s father, Polish composer Sir Andrzej Panufnik, who, his daughter says, was born, loved, and died in autumn.
Continuing their series of orchestral works by Sir Eugene Goossens, Sir Andrew Davis and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra turn to the Phantasy Concerto for Violin and the Second Symphony. Goossens was born in London in 1893, into a family of Belgian conductors and musicians. He trained in Brugesand at the Royal College of Music (studying composition under Stanford), played violin in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Sir Henry Wood, and became Sir Thomas Beecham’s go-to stand-in because of his ability to conduct the most demanding programmes on little or no rehearsal. Goossens gave the first UK concert performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, in 1921, and in 1923 became the first music director of the newly formed Rochester Philharmonic, before succeeding Fritz Reiner, in 1931, as chief conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He spent nine years in Australia, as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and was instrumental in the planning of the Sydney Opera House. Both works recorded here were composed towards the end of his life. The Second Symphony, dating from 1942–45, is a vivid and personal response to WWII. The Phantasy Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was originally promised to Heifetz, who never performed it. Having returned to London, Goossens gave the work’s premiere in a BBC broadcast in July 1959, and this was followed by a Proms performance in 1960; on both occasions the soloist was Tessa Robbins. Sir Andrew Davis and his Melbourne forces perform these rarely heard works with care and finesse, and Tasmin Little shines as the soloist in the Phantasy Concerto. The album is recorded in Surround Sound.
R. STRAUSS Violin Sonata, Op. 18. RESPIGHI Violin Sonata in b. Six Pieces: Melodia; Valse caressante; Serenata • Tasmin Little (vn); Piers Lane (pn) • CHANDOS 10749 (65:50)
Violinist Tasmin Little has amassed a very respectable discography on a number of different labels, though of late, she seems to have settled in as one of Chandos’s house artists. Her recent recording of Delius’s Violin Concerto received an urgent recommendation from me in 35:4, so I really looked forward to receiving her latest release of these two late romantic sonatas.
On the surface, Richard Strauss and Respighi may not seem to have a lot in common, but their respective violin sonatas have been paired on disc before, notably by Kyung-Wha Chung and Krystian Zimerman for Deutsche Grammophon and by Frank Almond and William Wolfram for Avie. Strauss composed his sonata in 1887 at the age of 23. It’s an inspired outpouring of youth hardly recognizable as music by the composer that Strauss would become. Respighi’s B-Minor Sonata—an earlier sonata in D Minor dates from the composer’s teens—was written in 1917, exactly 30 years later than Strauss’s sonata, by a more mature composer of 38.
Strauss’s sonata will no doubt be permanently associated with Heifetz, not because he championed it and twice recorded it, but because of his callous and stubborn determination to perform the piece in 1953 before an Israeli audience that still considered Strauss a Nazi collaborator and whose emotions were still raw from the Holocaust. That little stunt nearly cost Heifetz his career when an assailant attacked him outside his hotel, striking his right arm with an iron bar. While I don’t condone the death threats and violence against him, I understand the intensity of feelings that were aroused. Heifetz had no one to blame but himself for his own arrogance and intractable insensitivity. He canceled his last concert and departed Israel post haste, not to return there again until 1970.
The shame of it all is that Strauss’s sonata was written half a century before Hitler rose to power, and the piece is a passionate and deeply touching reflection of the late 19th-century German musical culture in which Strauss came of age. Unsurprisingly, Liszt and Wagner, both recently dead, appear as frequent ghosts throughout the sonata’s pages, but another guest one meets, less frequently perhaps but still very much alive when Strauss wrote the piece, is Brahms.
Respighi is not an easy composer to categorize. Some see him, as they see Strauss, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, and Sibelius as manifestations of a resistant strain of late romanticism that persisted well into the 20th century, while others have referred to Respighi as an Impressionist. I think one could support either view. There’s no question but that Respighi’s sonata is the more modern of the two works on the disc, at least in terms of its approach to harmony and tonality, but it remains an essentially romantic work in its gestural language—i.e., in its sweeping vistas and appeal to the emotions, both public and private.
The last time I reviewed a recording of Strauss’s violin sonata was in 32:3. That Atma CD also contained violin and piano works by Elgar and Ravel in performances by Jonathan Crow and Paul Stewart which I called “a desideratum of indescribably beautiful music matched by indescribably beautiful playing.” Pardon the pun, but Tasmin Little brings more than a little of Crow’s eloquent and elegant playing to the Strauss, but I would also have to say that in some of the sonata’s more technically taxing passages, she can sound ever so slightly flustered; and while the notes never actually get away from her, one senses she’s making an effort to stay on top of them. Next to Crow’s Strauss, another performance I’ve long liked is that by Dmitri Sitkovetsky on Virgin Classics. He has the technical chops to pull it off smoothly, but I don’t find him quite as emotionally engaged as either Crow or Little. Whatever the reason, Respighi’s sonata seems to suit Little a little better, both technically and temperamentally. Her performance of the piece is lithe and fully responsive to the score’s rapidly shifting moods and colors. In my opinion, it easily outclasses Tanja Becker-Bender on Hyperion, whose reading I find somewhat flighty and rudderless.
Overall, this has to be rated a very fine effort, and not just by Little, but also by Piers Lane who partners her most excellently on the piano, and by Chandos, which provides its usual deep and vivid sound. This may not be the absolute best Strauss out there, but it’s definitely among the very best of the Respighis, and the extra three encores from Respighi’s Six Pieces for Violin and Piano make for a most enriching program. Easily recommended.
FANFARE: Jerry Dubins
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Chandos have prided themselves on having a deep and long-term available back catalogue. Though distantly separated in time the present CD can be seen as an adjunct to two of the grand Chandos series of the 1980s and 1990s. The first was the Respighi orchestral music edition built around the Edward Downes BBCPO symphonies and concertos but supplemented by earlier discs conducted by Geoffrey Simon - still truly splendid - and later ones from Hickox and Noseda. The Downes and Simon discs would shine anew if issued in a box or boxes. The second comprised the half dozen discs they issued in the 1980s golden days of Järvi conducting the then SNO in the major orchestral works of Richard Strauss.
These two violin and piano works have previously appeared - although separately - on Chandos. There were in fact two CDs of the Strauss Sonata – one from Lydia Mordkovitch and the other from Sasha Rozhdestvensky. It comes as no surprise that the Respighi was also recorded by Mordkovitch. She contributed so much to the label that I have every reason to expect that, one of these days, there will be a complete Mordkovitch Chandos Edition. It’s certainly deserved – at least as much as a Takako Nishizaki edition for Naxos.
Little and Lane’s Strauss Sonata is flooded with melodic light and surges and muses with all the eruptive and serenading romance of the same composer’s Don Juan. Both Tasmin Little and Piers Lane are obviously up for it and flatter the 1887 Strauss with a most inward reading which makes it appear a greater work than perhaps it is. The stormy romance of the outer movements of the 1917 Respighi Sonata is emphasised by the utterly peaceful and romantically centred Sargasso calm of the Andante second movement. It stands head and shoulders above the other sonata movements on this disc, masterfully treading that febrile line between poetry and self-conscious sentimentality. Both Little and Lane have every right to be proud of their achievement here. Speaking of that mood we have three movements from the salon-destined and designed Sei Pezzi. I lament that the other three Kreislerian movements were not included – there was space. A puzzling and regretted omission.
With thanks to Chandos for commissioning a liner-note from the inspired Jessica Duchen. Such a fine writer and one whose Korngold book (Phaidon Press) has been unjustly eclipsed by the ‘major definitive biography’. The Duchen is much more than a valid alternative. Indeed, Korngold is a far from irrelevant comparison in the company of the two composers so nobly represented on this disc.
