The industry is bullish on violin concertos

Are we in a golden age of violinists? It looks like it. That astonishing young players keep coming up the ranks and capturing the public’s imagination is nothing new. But what really seems to mark our time as special is that so many of these young players continue to grow and to keep their hold on the public as they move through their 20s, 30s and 40s. Record companies have noted this and, despite cutbacks elsewhere, support violinists in expensive concerto recordings of standard repertory.

The Times’ reviewers check out the recent releases by several of the current generation of violin stars.

Mendelssohn/Shostakovich: Violin Concertos

Hilary Hahn, violin. Oslo Philharmonic, Marek Janowski and Hugh Wolff, conductors. (EMI)

*** 1/2

Hahn, at 23, inhabits Shostakovich’s austere and ominous world with uncanny understanding. She unfolds the opening nocturne -- one of the composer’s most desolate landscapes -- in one seemingly endless, breathtaking line and narrows her tone in the Passacaglia to a thread of a personal plea. The movement itself, under the expert guidance of conductor Marek Janowski, harks back to the police state of the final scene in “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”

Where she is less successful is in capturing the wild grotesquerie born out of pain in the Scherzo and the final Burlesque. Still, she’s fearless, taking the Scherzo at Shostakovich’s fast tempo. Her playing in the Mendelssohn Concerto, led by Hugh Wolff, is suave, mellow and sweet, evoking the relaxed, refined sensibility of an old master.

-- Chris Pasles

*

Tchaikovsky/Shostakovich: Violin Concertos

Ilya Gringolts, violin. Israel Philharmonic. Itzhak Perlman, conductor. (Deutsche Grammophon)

** 1/2

Ilya Gringolts was 16 when he won the 1998 Paganini Competition in Italy playing Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. This recording, however, even though conducted by Gringolts’ mentor, Itzhak Perlman, doesn’t measure up to recent competition. The young violinist makes short little jagged lines out of the flow of the first movement and sounds sluggish and wiry in the Scherzo. True, his Passacaglia is full of protest, but it doesn’t begin to reflect the horrors evoked, say, in Hilary Hahn’s recording with the Oslo Philharmonic. Somehow Gringolts suffers as himself; others suffer as Shostakovich and humanity.

On the other hand, his personal approach to Tchaikovsky’s Concerto bucks the trend to objectify this composer’s music. Gringolts finds the secret of the work in Tchaikovsky’s inspiration, his love for the young violinist Joseph Kotek. His playing ranges from the flirtatious and beguiling to an ardent declaration of feeling. He is warmly seconded in all this by Perlman’s detailed conducting.

-- C.P.

Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Opus 61; Two Romances: In G, Opus 40; in F, Opus 50

Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin. New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, conductor. (Deutsche Grammophon)

***

Mutter’s technical control and artistic overview are awesomely deployed in the purely musical service of the Olympian work. Fiery authority has long since been the violinist’s trademark; she uses it here to build a virtually definitive reading of a familiar masterpiece.

In the opening movement, and in portions of the Larghetto, she flirts with inaudibility, attempting to underline the dynamic contrasts in the piece; sometimes, that distorts the longer musical line. But this is a quibble. The work has a fresh life under Mutter’s probing; Masur and the orchestra add solidity to the enterprise. Mutter plays Kreisler’s cadenzas with her usual panache.

-- Daniel Cariaga

*

Mozart: Violin Concertos Nos. 1, 3, 4

Viktoria Mullova, violin and conductor; Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. (Philips)

*** 1/2

It is now 20 years since a young violinist dubbed “the ice maiden” made headlines by defecting from the Soviet Union. She was frighteningly good if a bit ferocious in her severe playing. But over the years, Mullova has also demonstrated plenty of fire on stage and off (there was a prominent affair with Claudio Abbado), and she has been a favorite collaborator with Esa-Pekka Salonen for 20th century concertos. The latest wrinkle in her career has been her rejection of the industrial-strength Soviet school of fiddling, exchanging modern steel strings for the gut strings of old.

Here in three of Mozart’s five concertos, which she performs with an orchestra of period instruments, you get the best of old and new. Her playing is as elegant, sure-fingered and marvelously in tune as ever, but there is a new sense of coloration. The floating effect she gets in the slow movements is especially entrancing but, in all respects (including her conducting), these are fresh, beautifully gauged performances.

-- Mark Swed

*

Brahms: Violin Concerto, Double Concerto

Gil Shaham, violin; Jian Wang, cello. Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, conductor. (Deutsche Grammophon)

** 1/2

The subject is bread-and-butter Brahms, and the latest attempts by some of today’s stars to say something fresh won’t seduce you away from the cherished recording teams of yore. In the Violin Concerto, Abbado states most things casually at hurried speeds, and Shaham makes attractively slender sounds that mostly skim over the music’s surface. Just another night at the concerto factory.

Skip to the Double Concerto, recorded about a year and a half later, and the picture changes. Abbado’s tempos broaden, the textures thicken, the weight increases to Teutonic proportions. It sounds like the work of a different conductor, even allowing for the more autumnal flavor of the Double. Perhaps as a result, Shaham digs deeper, while Wang opens with sufficient gravitas, but often fades into reticence later on.

-- Richard S. Ginell

*

Maxim Vengerov

“Maxim Vengerov Plays Bach, Shchedrin, Ysaye” (EMI)

***

Siberian-born violinist Maxim Vengerov, 26 and sounding like an old, nimble soul, makes a bold enough noise to give this solo violin recording a large, deep, mysterious presence. Although little of Bach’s music appears here, he is a strong reference point in a set including Eugene Ysaye’s Bach-based sonatas and Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s entrancing and virtuosic “Echo Sonata,” a 300th birthday tribute to Bach.

Vengerov picks up a Baroque violin for Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, normally heard in its big-throated organ version. Here, it gains a dignity and intimacy through the instrument’s dry sonority and an understated performance. For a contrasting lark of a finale, the album closes with a live recording of Shchedrin’s Balalaika, a pizzicato puzzler written for Vengerov.

Josef Woodard

*

On the Web

To hear samples from albums by Hilary Hahn, Ilya Gringolts and Anne-Sophie Mutter, visit www.calendarlive.com/recordings.