Berg Violin Concerto a Delicate Balance

Alban Berg’s elegiac 1936 Violin Concerto, his last completed work, is a unique combination of serial severity and swooning lyricism--music that tends to rub listeners of both the Modernist and Romantic persuasions the wrong way.

An unsettled, unsettling composition, it was dedicated by its composer to “the Memory of an Angel,” that angel being the then-recently deceased--at age 19--Manon Gropius, daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler (yes, Gustav Mahler’s irrepressibly inspirational, among other things, widow).

What makes the Violin Concerto so problematic for some listeners and moving for others is that it alternates aching sentimentality (at times bringing to mind, oddly, the concerto by that master musical confectioner Frederick Delius) with atonal violence. The conflict is never really resolved, although the music ends in quiet resignation, after the fashion of “Das Lied von der Erde” by Mahler, whose presence is felt elsewhere in the concerto as well.

It is a fragile, delicately balanced creation, equally daunting for the soloist (for whom it presents an enormous technical challenge but no opportunities for display), conductor and orchestra.

Recent months have more than doubled the number of its available recordings, with two reissues, one brand-new edition and a previously unreleased live performance.

The concerto was commissioned and first performed in 1936 by the American violinist Louis Krasner. His deservedly famous live performance, recorded by Swedish radio two years later with Fritz Busch conducting the Stockholm Philharmonic, is now available in digitally remastered form on the Boston-based GM label (GM 20006).

What comes through in this sonically dim recording is a good idea of Krasner’s secure, committed playing but very little of what the orchestra is up to. It is a document worth having, but hardly the one Berg Violin Concerto to live with.

The coupling is Schoenberg’s less overtly emotional--although far showier for the soloist--and wholly 12-tone Violin Concerto, completed in Los Angeles in 1936, the same year as the Berg.

Krasner remains an effective, commanding soloist here, and the 1954 live recording, with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting the Cologne Radio Orchestra, is more than listenable.

The closest competitor to Krasner’s Berg in terms of warmth, intensity and dramatic balance is Yehudi Menuhin, not in his rather awful commercial recording, resurrected a few months back as part of EMI’s commemoration of the violinist’s 75th birthday, but in a previously unreleased Swiss radio live recording dating from 1964 (Cascavelle 2003, mid-price).

Menuhin’s masterful collaborator here is conductor Ernest Ansermet, who with his Geneva-based Orchestre de la Suisse Romande produced some of the most extraordinarily sensitive recorded interpretations of 20th-Century music that we have.

The violinist’s playing is more secure technically than in any of the studio recordings he was producing at the time, and he projects with extraordinary acuity the over-the-top sweetness shot through with anger that characterizes the concerto.

Recorded sound is excellent here and in the remainder of a treasurable Berg program in which Ansermet also leads a suite from “Wozzeck,” with Suzanne Danco both fiercely accurate and touchingly vulnerable in the soprano solos, and the awesome Three Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6.

Kyung Wha Chung is a leading interpreter among today’s violinists of the Berg concerto. But her recorded version (London 430 349, mid-price) projects its fleeting ferocity at the expense of its prevailing tenderness, with Sir Georg Solti and his Chicago Symphony providing coarse, overheated support.

The companion piece on London is the more dour Chamber Concerto of Berg in a first-rate performance featuring violinist Gyorgy Pauk, pianist Peter Frankl and the London Sinfonietta under David Atherton’s incisive direction.

The one totally new recording of the Violin Concerto in this batch is by French-born Nell Gotkovsky, with the Sofia Philharmonic under American conductor Victor Yampolsky (Pyramid 13499).

This is a lush-toned reading that strives for a tragic monumentality that isn’t really in the music. Berg’s concerto is a more intimate statement than these accomplished performers would have us believe.

Their coupling is, unaccountably, the 50th-odd Beethoven Violin Concerto available in CD format.