Rózsa: Violin Concerto — Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 2 (LSO Live)
★★★★☆
I had tea once with Miklos Rozsa in a friend’s flat, around the corner from Abbey Road. It was my first encounter with a Golden Age Hollywood composer, and I had far more curiosity than he was prepared to satisfy. He wanted to talk about his concert works, not movie scores. I kept reverting to The Jungle Book and Julius Caesar while he nudged me towards his neglected concertos.
The violin concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz in 1953, took three years to reach the stage while the soloist fiddled around with the score. Heifetz had been savaged by critics for premiering Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s movie-highlights concerto; he did not want to get burned twice.
The concerto is a three-stop journey. The first movement has an exilic edginess, a reminiscence of lost motherlands. The second is filled with romantic yearnings, a fin-de-siecle nostalgia. The finale is unmistakably Hungarian, a helter-skelter love-chase across the Magyar plains.
Unlike Korngold, Rozsa conceals his movie credits and aims for concert-stage drama. He makes the soloist work hard to overcome an energised orchestra. It becomes a fight to the finish and I’m still not clear who won, but the ride is well worth the fare and half an hour of top-drawer Rozsa is something you won’t forget.
The soloist is the LSO’s Russian-Montenegran leader Roman Simovic, who is virtuosic enough to make light of Heifetz’s flashy bits and Balkan enough to empathise with the content. Simon Rattle draws a thrilling intensity from the London Symphony Orchestra.
The Rozsa concerto is paired with Bartok’s second, less successful in several ways. Simovic has little to add to the annals of great performances and the LSO seems to be going through the motions with conductor Kevin John Edusei. It’s a satisfactory concert experience, not a lasting recording.
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