Sarasate: Music for Violin & Orchestra Vol 4 / Tianwa Yang

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SARASATE Introduction et Tarantelle. Jota de San Fermin. Fantaisie sur le Don Juan de Mozart. Fantaisie sur Der Freischütz de Weber. Jota de Pamplona. Airs...


SARASATE Introduction et Tarantelle. Jota de San Fermin. Fantaisie sur le Don Juan de Mozart. Fantaisie sur Der Freischütz de Weber. Jota de Pamplona. Airs écossais. Le Rêve. L’Esprit follet • Tianwa Yang (vn); Ernest Martínez, cond; OS de Navarra • NAXOS 8.572276 (67: 08)


Tianwa Yang’s exciting series of Pablo Sarasate’s music for violin and orchestra (she’s devoted another series to his music for violin and piano) comes to an end with this fourth volume, containing many items that may be unfamiliar to some listeners. The program opens with the Introduction and Tarantella , a favorite of Nathan Milstein, who played it with great élan with piano (Sarasate himself also recorded it, without the Introduction, in 1904). This performance by Yang, alternately smoldering and coruscating, additionally may reveal to some listeners, in Ernest Martínez Izquierdo’s accompaniment with the Orqesta Sinfónica de Navarra, not only an additional brilliance in the violin part, but also a skillfully wrought orchestration that enhances the work’s ethnic vibrancy. Even Joseph Gold, who once again for this volume writes especially perceptive notes, isn’t inclined to praise the Jota de San Fermin , but Yang plays it perhaps as convincingly and offers listeners as many choice violinistic pleasures as anyone today might do.


If Sarasate’s Fantaisie sur le Don Juan de Mozart , less frequently performed than the composer’s well-known fantasy on Carmen , doesn’t treat musical themes of equally inherent dash, La ci darem la mano should be equally familiar to many listeners; and Sarasate embellishes it in his own unmistakable way, by turns liquidly brilliant and hauntingly insinuating. Yang delivers the aria-like themes with a rich, smooth tone. Sarasate’s Fantaisie sur Der Freischütz de Weber explores the opera’s more suggestive moments as well as its barnstorming ones, all translated into Sarasate’s violinistic idiom without doing violence to their musical and dramatic identity.


Gold deems the Jota de Pamplona one of composer’s best pieces, and it sports the Spanish finery familiar from Sarasate’s more familiar works. The Airs écossais , which Gold suggests might have been a response to Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and Alexander Mackenzie’s Pibroch Suite , declaims its strutting Scottish tunes with a crackling energy (notable in Yang’s performance) that could place it in time among the composer’s most popular works. Le Rêve takes the form of an expressive tone poem, lasting more than 11 minutes in Yang’s performance. It may not explore so many hidden psychic corners as do Eugène Ysaÿe’s works in the genre—or Ernest Chausson’s Poème , inspired by them—but its less shifting harmonic terrain still creates shadowy enough impression of interplay between light and dark to place it on firm footing among them, and Yang’s performance should help to cement its position there. L’Esprit follet brings the program to a close in a performance that’s both fey and affecting.


The engineers have captured Yang up flatteringly close, but they’ve lost none of the orchestral detail. Does she sound as brilliant as did Sarasate? She surely sounds different—hers isn’t Sarasate’s easy elegance. But she’s authoritative and thoroughly convincing in her own way, which, in any case, might be more appealing than Sarasate’s to modern audiences raised listening to violinists who endowed his works with an almost Slavic personality. Urgently recommended, like the rest of Yang’s series (there’s a complete collection of Sarasate’s works, by violinists Gabriel Croitoru and Manuel Guillén Navarro with Jacques Bodmer conducting the Orquestra Ciudad de Málaga on Regis 010/1/2/3, which I reviewed Fanfare 19:6 but judged in 34:4 to fall below Yang’s mark), to listeners of all kinds.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham


Product Description:

  • Release Date: October 29, 2013


  • UPC: 747313227679


  • Catalog Number: 8572276


  • Label: Naxos


  • Number of Discs: 1


  • Composer: Pablo de Sarasate


  • Conductor: Ernest Martínez Izquierdo


  • Orchestra/Ensemble: Navarra Symphony Orchestra


  • Performer: Tianwa Yang