Customer Reviews

BARTOK:VIOLIN CTO. 2

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This is out of print already?! Sad sad. The Bartok is very fine, but that's not the reason to get the disc, because there are honestly better (and cheaper) Bartok Seconds out there--my personal favorite is Stern/Lenny/NYPhil on Sony--they positively soar with enthusiasm. That performance is coupled with a Stern/Ormandy reading of Bartok's first (and for many years undiscovered) violin concerto, a work that's not particularly memorable.

The present disc has a Bartok concerto played with great technical skill by Ms. Mutter and great technical blandness by Mr. Ozawa, which is typical with him. I know, like Karajan, he wanted blend blend blend, but Bartok's music is edgy and angular, dammit, and Seiji rounds off all the corners. Still, this is a perfectly satisfactory performance, as long as you supplement it with others to hear the difference, and there are many great ones, from the aforementioned Stern to Menuhin to Chung to Millova. The biggest mark against this performance is that it is not very memorable after the fact. Well-executed, but not much personality.

But the real reason to look for this disc is the Moret concerto. Here's a composer who isn't heard as much as he deserves to be, probably because people see he is "modern" and run screaming for the exits or for the soothing progressive-music-in-sheep's-clothing of Philip Glass and Tangerine Dream. Pity, that, because Moret is a great and original voice and here he has written a thoroughly modern violin concerto that will stick in your memory. It is dissonant yet tender, modern yet traditional in many ways, with very creative orchestration. It is supposed to describe a dream, according to the composer, who describes long walks through dense, shadowy forest. There is a mystical or perhaps "spiritual" (overused word, sorry, but it really fits) component to Moret's relationship with nature, but we're not dealing with mysticism. The finale is that most welcome thing in a modern work, upbeat and optimistic instead of a description of some great cataclysm. (I once commented to a friend that Beethoven would never write his Pastorale Symphony in modern times because it would be seen as too naive.) There's an obvious Bartokian influence, from the rolling timpani to the dissonant double stops to the very loud brass. But there are also some magnificent finely-shaded dynamics and textures that are so transparent they are fascinating to behold, as well as a very taut structure that is somewhere between sonata form and "episodic rondo." Don't look for "a tune you can hum," but then again, don't look for that in most late Beethoven, either. David Hurwitz states in his review that the Moret concerto is not particularly memorable. Reason enough to recommend it.