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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful violin music and playing with Barton and Clement Violin Concerto,
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This review is from: Beethoven, Clement: Violin Concertos (Audio CD)
Rachel Barton Pine, a talented American young violinist, has done one of the best violin recordings I ever listend to, restating the forgotten Franz Clement Violin Concerto in D major (composed in 1805).
Clement was the dedicatee of Beethoven Violin Concerto, and for good! The concerto is anterior to Beethoven's (which is of 1806) and many lines of it constituted an evident model for Beethoven score. The last movement instead reminds us of the last movement of a famous Schubert Sonatina, composed by the way in 1816! This cast a good light on the prestige and reputation of Clement's playing and composing amidst his contemporaries now more famous than he is. This music is particularly beautiful, and this concerto stands between the best ever written for the instrument. I must say that also the Royal Philharmonic shows at its peak, and the direction by José Serebrier is simply masterful, in keeping a powerful though smooth sound and giving space to all the harmonic resources of both the instruments and the score. Thank you Miss Barton for this unforgettable performance!
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful Coupling,
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This review is from: Beethoven, Clement: Violin Concertos (Audio CD)
A beautiful coupling of the unknown Clement violin concerto and the justly celebrated Beethoven violin concerto. Both are expertly played and enjoyable to listen to. One can see why Beethoven was taken with Clement's ability.
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, despite - or because of - being not so interesting,
By
This review is from: Beethoven, Clement: Violin Concertos (Audio CD)
The main attraction of this disc will be the Violin Concerto, not of Beethoven, but of Franz Clément.
Clément (1780-1842) was the premiere performer of Beethoven's Concerto, written in 1806, for a benefit concert given in his favor. It is said that Clément rehearsed directly from the manuscript, which is ascribed to him "par Clemenza pour Clement". Supposedly Clément had a sweet and delicate tone, especially in the high registers, and a technique far removed from the more forceful and assertive Rode-Viotti School. He was also a great prankster. The concert program to that benefit concert announced that he would also play a set of variations with his violin "turned around" (umgekehrt, not clear to me if it meant scroll to shoulder or simply back up with strings facing the ground). But Clément was also a composer, and Rachel Barton Pine has done a great service to musicology by recording his own Violin Concerto. It was composed a year before Beethoven's, and premiered at the same concert in which Beethoven gave the first fully public performance of his Eroica. It is one of six Clément wrote; most are lost, this one was reissued in 2005 in a modern critical edition by English musicologist Clive Brown, who contributes the highly informative liner notes. Musicologists love to point the flaws in Beethoven's VC: supposedly, its first movement rambles, the structure is unclear, its melodic material is undistinctive, it is full of scales and tritones that liken it to a book of violin studies. But of course, one needs only to hear the Concerto to recognize that it is a masterpiece, despite - or because of? - its purported flaws. If still in doubt, the musicologists should listen to Clément's. They would hear very clearly the difference between a work of which the best one can say is that it is "interesting", and a towering masterpiece. The liner notes go to great pains to stress the differences between Clément's Concerto and those from Beethoven's time that still have some currency today: Paganini's, Spohr's, Viotti's 22nd. I find this true only to an extent. Its sheer length (40 minutes) certainly likens it to Beethoven's, as well as its rich orchestration (same as Beethoven's), and the truly symphonic presence of the orchestra in the tuttis, making it (though not as impressively as in Beethoven's Concerto) an equal partner with and competitor to the soloist rather than just a back-seat passenger to a pure show of virtuosity. No, Beethoven's Violin Concerto, in all its symphonic scope, wasn't the sudden and unprecedented stroke of its composer's genius. It had precedents - at least one. But then Clément's piece does inhabit the melodic and harmonic world of early 19th-Century "gallant" and elegant style - evoking not so much Mozart or Haydn (let alone Beethoven) as, despite the liner notes' claim, Rode and Kreutzer. Sure, as with Beethoven, the virtuosic flourishes of the solo violin only elaborate on ideas that are first and foremost lyrical and songful; but those melodic ideas are nowhere as distinctive as Beethoven's. There are also very episodic moments where one recognizes a formula familiar from Beethoven's Concerto, as if the latter had paid homage to his admired fiddler with these borrowings. But they are slight. A comparison of both middle movements is telling. Clément's is pretty while you are hearing it and leaves no mark as soon as the phrase is sung. Beethoven's is sublime. Still, Clément's piece is interesting if only for allowing one to realize, by sheer contrast, what it is that makes the greatness of Beethoven's Concerto: first, the choice of simple melodic cells with strong rhythmic (and, in the case of the opening timpani, timbral) contours that are immediately distinctive and ear-catching. Some musicologists claim that Beethoven didn't have a gift for melody: either they are kidding, or they are deaf. In some of his compositions (and this is valid only for some movements in some works; his genius can't be limited to that) Beethoven's music cells may be reduced to minimal elements (for instance in the outer movements of the Violin Concerto, or the opening movements of the 3rd, 5th and 7th Symphonies), but they have a unique rhythmic and melodic contour that engraves them instantly in one's memory. Second, Beethoven will develop these simple cells to a hilt, he will dwell on them, harp on them to exhaustion. Hence the claim of some (including lukewarm critics at the premiere of the Violin Concerto) that his music is repetitive and too long. So ultimately, Clément's Concerto is less appealing on the basis of its own merits than "interesting" for showing a) that Beethoven's Concerto was NOT after all an isolated meteorite fallen on earth from outer space, and yet b) that it was nonetheless unique. Other than pointing her unfailing beauty of tone and spotless intonation, one cannot fully gauge the value of Pine's interpretation in this hitherto unrecorded composition. In Beethoven's Concerto, she and Serebrier offer a very traditional view, stressing the composition's lyricism at the expense of its drama. In the opening movement Serebrier is leisurely to the point of laziness (and fusses with the rhythms in the introductory tutti, Mengelberg-like); the advantage is that Pine has plenty of space to fully unfold her chant in the movement's long lyrical lines, but overall it is a reading without much dynamism. The finale is taken at a tempo which is well within the norm established long ago by Kreisler, but with such a lack of accenting that is sounds edgeless and enervated. It is the second movement that benefits most from that ample and lyrical approach, and Pine plays it with commendable simplicity and absence of fussiness. One more point in her favor: she plays (in Clément's as well) her own cadenzas, and they are as good as any, be it Kreisler's or Beethoven/Schneiderhan's. Anybody seriously interested in Beethoven's VC should hear this for Clément - interested in a musicological manner, that is.
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