BARTOK Violin Concertos 1 & 2. Tetzlaff/Finnish RSO/Lintu. ONDINE 24/48. Qobuz Studio Stream.
(GRAMOPHONE Concerto Award 2018).
The world can seem awash with fine recordings of the Bartok Violin Concertos. They’re becoming as ubiquitous as the DSCH 1st was a few years back.
But whatever your favourites, be it Faust say, or Kelemen - you must hear this new one: it takes the music to the highest levels of subtlety and sensitivity, of both sound and interpretative sense.
I compared the Tetzlaff/Lintu1st Concerto (a work I sometimes lose patience with as its 2nd movement blusters about) to the recent Frang/Franck, and noted how wilfully soloist-led the Frang is; a showier, impassioned performance with which there seems little wrong - until you hear the more richly collaborative solo/orchestra dialogue/balance of Tetzlaff/Lintu, with a keenly instinctive sense of timing and shades of colour between the performance partners. Lintu has a Boulezian ear for such details of level, orchestral transparency and blend - and is a wonderfully responsive accompanist. (I’m tempted to say that these are the very details that made me so enthusiastic about his new Lutosławski album of 1 and 4 - and perhaps such details are easily missed if you listen too hurriedly, or not often enough)…
Back to the soloists and from the very start, Frang is right there, out front, up and at you: the youthful, questing adventurer. Tetzlaff: warmer, more graceful, intimate and inward. It is very telling and gives him more space and range to grow and intensify his reading later.
On to the 2nd Concerto then and I wondered if my enthusiasm would be maintained. It is around an awful lot isn’t it?….
So, Here we go again……
It would be easy to write the same only more so about this one. That is true and then some, yet it seems hard at first to pick out anything obviously striking or individual. But by halfway through the 1st movement, you realise just how perfectly articulated, sounded-out and expressed each wonderful moment (there are quite a few in this piece!) actually is; Lintu’s orchestra, full, warm and classically poised as it sweeps into its first tutti, then startles you with the power and even savagery of its wind, brass and percussion outbursts, the effortless switching from humour to delicate accompaniment to passion. Tetzlaff isn’t overtly assuming any tziganerie, yet adumbrates shades of those colours into a warm, sinuous and marvellously varied shaping of the solo line.
You may object that this description could apply to varying degrees, to various other recordings - but I’ve simply never heard one which does everything quite so well and so consistently as this - and in truly splendid 24/48 sound. Warm, full, immediate.
(Steinbacher/Janowski say, is cooler & more objective; Kelemen/Kocsis more overtly wild, rooted and gypsyish; Faust/Harding spikier; Pat Kop true to her uniquely remarkable self, with Eötvös, more confrontational in his baring of weird texture and dissonances).
Tetzlaff breathes, sings and dances through the elegiac, playful and withdrawn elements of the andante; Lintu his obsessive accompanist, observer of precise fine-drawn detail but - always with and responding to his soloist’s every move.
The recording doesn’t miss a trick. This seems to be something of a Lintu/FRSO trademark: blended transparency…
Strikingly light-footed and danceable finale, a natural swing and flow to the rhythm (which is often heavier and more emphatically folk-inflected, say in Harding or Eotvos); often daringly slow, then that uncanny solo/ensemble natural-as-breathing togetherness as the dance sweeps on; and a final twist in the tale - the purely orchestral alternative ending, stunningly conclusive here with snarling devil-may-care brass.
Still a nice surprise, and relatively rare on record (Faust/Harding have it; Kelemen/Kocsis give you both, easily programmable…).
(GRAMOPHONE Concerto Award 2018).
The world can seem awash with fine recordings of the Bartok Violin Concertos. They’re becoming as ubiquitous as the DSCH 1st was a few years back.
But whatever your favourites, be it Faust say, or Kelemen - you must hear this new one: it takes the music to the highest levels of subtlety and sensitivity, of both sound and interpretative sense.
I compared the Tetzlaff/Lintu1st Concerto (a work I sometimes lose patience with as its 2nd movement blusters about) to the recent Frang/Franck, and noted how wilfully soloist-led the Frang is; a showier, impassioned performance with which there seems little wrong - until you hear the more richly collaborative solo/orchestra dialogue/balance of Tetzlaff/Lintu, with a keenly instinctive sense of timing and shades of colour between the performance partners. Lintu has a Boulezian ear for such details of level, orchestral transparency and blend - and is a wonderfully responsive accompanist. (I’m tempted to say that these are the very details that made me so enthusiastic about his new Lutosławski album of 1 and 4 - and perhaps such details are easily missed if you listen too hurriedly, or not often enough)…
Back to the soloists and from the very start, Frang is right there, out front, up and at you: the youthful, questing adventurer. Tetzlaff: warmer, more graceful, intimate and inward. It is very telling and gives him more space and range to grow and intensify his reading later.
On to the 2nd Concerto then and I wondered if my enthusiasm would be maintained. It is around an awful lot isn’t it?….
So, Here we go again……
It would be easy to write the same only more so about this one. That is true and then some, yet it seems hard at first to pick out anything obviously striking or individual. But by halfway through the 1st movement, you realise just how perfectly articulated, sounded-out and expressed each wonderful moment (there are quite a few in this piece!) actually is; Lintu’s orchestra, full, warm and classically poised as it sweeps into its first tutti, then startles you with the power and even savagery of its wind, brass and percussion outbursts, the effortless switching from humour to delicate accompaniment to passion. Tetzlaff isn’t overtly assuming any tziganerie, yet adumbrates shades of those colours into a warm, sinuous and marvellously varied shaping of the solo line.
You may object that this description could apply to varying degrees, to various other recordings - but I’ve simply never heard one which does everything quite so well and so consistently as this - and in truly splendid 24/48 sound. Warm, full, immediate.
(Steinbacher/Janowski say, is cooler & more objective; Kelemen/Kocsis more overtly wild, rooted and gypsyish; Faust/Harding spikier; Pat Kop true to her uniquely remarkable self, with Eötvös, more confrontational in his baring of weird texture and dissonances).
Tetzlaff breathes, sings and dances through the elegiac, playful and withdrawn elements of the andante; Lintu his obsessive accompanist, observer of precise fine-drawn detail but - always with and responding to his soloist’s every move.
The recording doesn’t miss a trick. This seems to be something of a Lintu/FRSO trademark: blended transparency…
Strikingly light-footed and danceable finale, a natural swing and flow to the rhythm (which is often heavier and more emphatically folk-inflected, say in Harding or Eotvos); often daringly slow, then that uncanny solo/ensemble natural-as-breathing togetherness as the dance sweeps on; and a final twist in the tale - the purely orchestral alternative ending, stunningly conclusive here with snarling devil-may-care brass.
Still a nice surprise, and relatively rare on record (Faust/Harding have it; Kelemen/Kocsis give you both, easily programmable…).
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