Britten & Shostakovich: Violin Concertos

“Ehnes is a very fine violinist and there is barely a moment here when his playing is anything but silken in tone and sinuously refined...Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra make cultured colleagues but there is not much danger in their ostinato rhythms or edge to their attack.” --Gramophone Magazine, August 2013

“Ehnes is brilliantly supported by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, with Kirill Karabits totally at one with the soloist. This superb performance is coupled with one of the finest modern performances of Shostakovich’s glorious A minor Concerto that I have ever heard.” --International Record Review, September 2013

“it's the way that James Ehnes closes the opening movement [of the Britten] that most impresses, essaying a gossamer thread of such subtlety it becomes almost transparent.” --The Independent, 10th May 2013 ***

“Karabits and Ehnes share a powerful idea of [the Britten's] narrative, and each scene is vividly realised...Karabits draws searing clarity, balance and detail from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra...his treatment of the Shostakovich Concerto is riveting” --BBC Music Magazine, July 2013 ****

“The partnership between Ehnes, Karabits and the BSO comes across as a true meeting of minds, and these outstanding performances cannot be recommended highly enough.” --The Telegraph, 14th June 2013

“Everything hits the mark here...The Britten has never opened with such cool poise...the stuff of record critics’ dreams...Possibly the greatest recording that this concerto has received...Ehnes’s Shostakovich is just as good...Essential listening.” --The Arts Desk, 22nd June 2013

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Berg, Britten: Violin Concertos

"Daniel Hope launches a creative partnership with Paul Watkins to expressive and telling effect. Assured playing makes this a welcome first coupling of two elegiac concertos...the accompanied cadenza is finely sustained, and after an eloquent transition, Hope makes the Adagio a fitting formal and expressive culmination...few recordings convey more of the work’s content... At almost 36 minutes this is possibly the most expansive reading on disc (of the Britten), but with Hope so much more inside the piece than Vengerov in his recent recording, and Watkins finding the overall cohesiveness that eludes Rostropovich, such a consideration rarely comes to mind. Admirers of Hope will not be disappointed..." --Grammophone, April 2004

"Berg’s Violin Concerto appeared only infrequently on LPs: Ivry Gitlis, André Gertler, and Louis Krasner (who commissioned it) made the three monaural recordings that carried the concerto pretty much through the early stereophonic era. Later, they were joined by Isaac Stern; but the ensuing digital era has witnessed a spate of new recordings and interpretative ideas... André Gertler made an impact in the Concerto that nevertheless represented only a suggestion, though hardly a faint one, of its expressive possibilities. Isaac Stern unfolded the work’s programmatic tableau with the rich, sweet tone he produced in those halcyon days. Among later interpreters, Perlman followed Stern, while Mutter, together with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Orchestra, pulverized the Concerto’s lines, and Mark Kaplan took a flexible approach that fit the grim story line like a glove.

Daniel Hope sings with Gertler’s understanding but probes even deeper into the possibilities of nuance the violin part offers to an empathetic soloist. Like Gertler, he stresses the work’s lyricism, which he inflects in a high romantic style well in accord with Berg’s own syncretistic vision. The first section is insinuating; the catastrophe, overpowering; and the conclusion, ethereal. Hope and Paul Watkins follow a new edition prepared by Douglas Jarman, which, according to Jarman’s notes, corrects mistakes transferred from Berg’s manuscript to the full score. Hope himself gave the premiere of that version in 1995.

Britten’s Violin Concerto, from 1940, can be linked to Berg’s in several non-trivial ways: according to Donald Mitchell’s notes, Britten heard the premiere of Berg’s work in Barcelona, both concertos center on tragedies (although Britten’s subject matter appears more global than personal), and they were composed within only a few years of each other. If Berg’s Concerto hardly entered the mainstream for a generation, Britten’s suffered the same neglect. There may be reasons. Technically brilliant, it’s no simple showpiece; lyrical and dramatic, it’s also ominous and disturbing. Daniel Hope brings great technical assurance and panache to the demanding second movement, an incisive Scherzo with a twist of lemon, and to the rapid passagework in the concluding Passacaglia. But he also adapts to the first movement’s fresh lyricism, softening what sometimes seems its brash cockiness but not its steely core, and to the Passacaglia’s haunting final page. As in Berg’s Concerto, he’s miked so close up that he owes some of his commanding presence to the generosity of the engineers, who have trained a bright spotlight on him. (They’ve also revealed the vivid orchestral colors of Berg’s Concerto with great depth of detail and the stormy sonorities of Britten’s work with little diminution of their gale force.) But he owes nothing to them for his firm grasp of the work’s complexities and his tone’s cutting strength. Ruggiero Ricci also combined strength and lyricism in a moving reading that barely emerges from what presumably the engineers took from an air-check. I remember finding Mark Lubotsky’s early readings of this Concerto favoring its more mordant passages (yet with strong-minded, soaring lyricism), while more recently, Maxim Vengerov has also brought a similar mix of sweet and sour to the work. Vengerov’s incisive slashes, however, as in the central movement, never leave ragged edges, as, at least in comparison, do Hope’s.

Daniel Hope may not be the most individual among younger violinists. But of him it can be said without exaggeration that he communicates the kind of dramatic power that only the greatest violinists of the preceding era, notably Heifetz and Oistrakh, could generate at peak moments.

Hope fries the ammeter’s circuitry throughout these two concertos: more than an hour of taut emotional tension. What he’s committed to disc supersedes others I’ve heard as a most visceral and deeply affecting recording of Berg’s Concerto; and that work is coupled with a performance of Britten’s that transmits its raw kinetic power. Strongly recommended." --Fanfare Magazine / June 2005

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