Customer Reviews

Bartok: Violin Concerto No. 1 / Berg: Violin Concerto

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First, the TT of 47 minutes all but rules out this disc. The recordings date from 1979 (Bartok, Janos Ferencsik conducting - it is a live recording, as revealed by very occasional coughs and various stage noises, and the final applause) and 1980 (Berg - studio, Vaclav Neumann at the baton) and were originally published in the ending days of the LP - but this is LP duration, and the CD reissue should have been augmented. The interpretations would have to be really exceptional to warrant purchase, when those works are available in so many other and great recordings.

They aren't.

Since Isaac Stern and Eugene Ormandy's 1961 premiere recording of the newly discovered youtfhful concerto of Bartok (A Life In Music: Isaac Stern, Volume 9, it was first performed in 1958 in Basle, by Hanz-Heinz Schneeberger and conductor and wealthy patron of music Paul Sacher), there have been a number of very successful recordings that have underlined the ecstatic, time-suspended quality of the first movement, from David Oistrakh (Szymanowski Violin Concerto No 1; Bartok Violin Concerto No. 1 ; Hindemith: Violin Concerto (Urania)) to Midori (Bartok - Violin Concertos No.1 & No.2 / Midori, Berlin Phil., Mehta) and Kremer (Bartok: Concertos). But at 10:23 minutes, Suk is the slowest of them all (other than Stern's premiere recording, everybody is under 10 minutes), and with his pulse by the note rather than by the beat, which makes you loose entirely the lilt of Bartok's 6/8 time signature, I feel that the Czech fiddler has overstepped the line between ecstasy and sluggish boredom. His beauty of tone also works against him: stressing the elegiac, he remains somewhat placid and lacks the throbbing bow tension of Oistrakh and Stern. His second movement is better, but you need only to turn to Stern to realize what the soloist and orchestra's greater muscularity and hair of extra drive, added to the Philadelphia's better sonics - with Ferencsik, the violin tuttis are so distant that they deprive the lush, romantic climaxes of any impact - and Stern's fatter tone bring to the music. Again, while hearing Suk play this un-typical, Strauss-indebted music, a sense of boredom insinuates itself, which is dispelled hearing Stern.

In the LP days, when recordings of Berg's Violin Concerto were a really rare commodity (before 1970 you didn't need a third hand to count them), Suk made a really exceptional recording in 1965, one that led the field (the merits of Stern-Bernstein Berg: Kammerkonzert, Ferras-Prêtre Les Introuvables de Christian Ferras [Box Set], Grumiaux-Markevitch Berg / Stravinsky: Violin Concerto - Grumiaux, Markevitch, Bour and Menuhin-Boulez Berg: Violin Concerto / Bloch: Violin Concerto - Menuhin Edition notwithstanding), with the same orchestra (Czech Philharmonic, a supremely virtuosic group) but under its then music director, Karel Ancerl (Ancerl Gold Edition 3: Mendelssohn - Bruch - Berg/Violin Concertos). It benefited from the clear and vivid sonics affording great detail and pungency to the orchestra, from Suk's pure and stellar tone and also from his relatively cool and unsentimental approach (there's enough emotion in the notes and one doesn't necessarily need to milk it) - although it was perhaps a little too uninflected and matter of fact in the first movement.

The new recording is very similar in conception, a tad faster and still somewhat uninflected in the first movement, and imperceptibly faster as well in the final chorale. In the intervening years Suk has lost little of his purity of tone. But the sonics are muffled, the orchestral details are dulled and the orchestra doesn't approach the bite and pungent power it had under Ancerl. This would remain a valuable version still today - if not one to put on top of the pile - if Suk hadn't done his earlier recording, but as it is, it doesn't add anything to his previous version, but rather subtracts from it.

A disc better reserved then to the most diehard admirers and collectors of Josef Suk. Music-lovers without this particular agenda will do better with Suk's previous recording of Berg's VC under Ancerl, and will have a number of better options in Bartok, and particularly, in the same general conception, those mentioned in the course of this review.

Josef Suk admirable musicality, mercurial performance, untamed energy and eloquent lyricism make virtually impossible to ignore him.

And this was the fortunate case, when I listened this splendid version of the exigent Bartok' s violin concerto.

Regardless my two desert island choices are Isaac Stern with Bernstein and the new York Philharmonic and Yehudi Menuhin with Antal Dorati this is an excellent option to take into account.