I never cease to listen in awe at the supernatural control violinist James Ehnes has over his bow. His latest album, featuring the Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich concertos with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra may not be easy listening, but it commands instant and total respect.
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This Onyx release with conductor Kirill Karabits puts Ehnes in the position of having to be at once strong and delicate, lyrical as well as dispassionate, cool but not devoid of humanity. And somehow all of these emotional attributes need to both inform and be conjured by finely tuned physical movements.
Ehnes is brilliant on all counts, and is ably backed up by Karabits and orchestra.
Besides the Canadian violinist’s technical and musical abilities, I found the pairing of these two mid-20th century works to be a fascinating study in similarities and contrasts.
There’s a lot to admire in Britten’s Op. 15 Violin Concerto, premiered by Antonio Brosa at Carnegie Hall in 1940, during the composer’s American exile. The three movements each play obsessively with musical themes, but are vastly different in character. The strongest is the closing Passacaglia, which teeters between consonance and dissonance, hope and despair right until the last, ambiguous chord.
But what on its own sounds engaging pales next to Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 77, written right after World War II, but kept stashed away until 1955.
The Russian composer also plays and replays limited thematic material, and comes from a similar aesthetic. But there is a throughgoing momentum to the music that has us at the end of each movement before we know it. The Britten concerto ends up sounding like much more of a patchwork of ideas that could use a bit more glue.
That’s just a personal quibble, of course, and doesn’t reflect in any way on the remarkable work of the musicians on this album. But I find myself returning to the Shostakovich concerto, not Britten’s.
You can get all the album details here.
Ehnes will be in town to play the Britten concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 10 and 12, with wonderful French conductor Stéphane Denève, a prime opportunity to catch what is likely to be as good a live performance as this piece is ever going to get.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
