Customer Reviews

Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor; Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1; Schubert: Rondo in A

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Nigel Kennedy and Jeffery Tate were simply impeccable in this CD. Both Bruch and Mendelssohn's works were very well done. In fact, If I'd only own one CD for these two works, I wouldn't mind to have this recording.

Kennedy put a lot of emotion and passion in his strings. There was no holdback, he was not tentative at all, and his technique is good enough to let the music just flow out of his strings, and he attacks every notes with passion. Both pieces are just so smooth and flow so naturally from the first note to the last.

I also have the Bruch concerto made by Heifetz. I compared kennedy's work with Heifetz's, and there is really nothing about Kennedy I can complain. That being said, I think that tells how good Kennedy is. Kennedy in this work has risen above his peers today. I just didn't hear this kind intensity from say, Joshua Bell, or Chiao-Liang Lin.

The Mendelssohn is one of the very best violin concerti ever written, and while there are countless recordings, I don't think you can do much better than this one. The sound is gorgeous, the pacing is just right, not rushed but not drawn out either, and Kennedy plays beautifully and lyrically without getting overly cloying and sentimental as some soloists do, especially in the haunting second movement where I have heard many succumb to the temptation to go over the top. An excellent recording of the Bruch too, although I am less familiar with the various recordings of it and not in the same position to compare it with others.

This is one of the best recordings of these two concertos that I've ever heard. With such an acclaimed performer as Nigel Kennedy, it isn't surprising the standard is excellent. The music really flows from the heart and his stlye of performing really suits this type of romantic music. His technical ability is remarkable and playing the violin a little myself, I can safely say he is one of the best living violinist I've ever seen.

Going by the album cover, showing that Kennedy prefers looking cool to dressing up, one might expect wild, rebellious playing. But things are quite the opposite though, with Kennedy favoring a laid back approach. He's actually a sensitive musician, surprising for someone who is clearly trying to win popularity with his eccentric appearance. Listening to this disc, I was impressed by his ability to play with touching, sincere lyricism. There's maturity here, and although he sometimes delivers bite (which I personally welcome), he's clearly going for the heart. In both of these warhorses, there are moments when he slows down and just lets the beauty of the music surround us. Personality is present without question, and while I think Kennedy can lean towards reticence, it's probably intentional.

As aforementioned, Kennedy can deliver bite. This isn't necessarily the same as drive, meaning that Kennedy isn't out to set your pulse racing. Sometimes Kennedy can seem to play with indifferent roughness, a quality I used to despise, but here I find myself liking it. In overplayed works like these, it's awfully easy to become bored, and anything new and out of the ordinary is welcome. And I should make it clear that Kennedy's bite is never rough to the point of sounding out of place, like on his famous Four Seasons recording. He has restraint; some would say he has too much.

The number one drawback for me was the lack of a premier orchestra to accompany Kennedy. Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra are competent performers, to be sure, but Kennedy completely overshadows them. Again, this may have been the point, but the whole effort would have been much more rewarding if Kennedy would have been playing with a top notch orchestra and conductor. I always thought Kennedy and Rattle fit like a hand and glove (they certainly do in their recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto), and Rattle would have made a superb collaborator. But we might as well enjoy what we do have, and Tate does give Kennedy suave, polished playing from the ECO, if not much more.

In closing, this is a fine disc. If you're a Kennedy fan, this CD is absolutely indispensible.

Clear? Utmostly classical if not classic violin playing that is so beautiful that it sounds like a visit at the museum, or, and I am afraid it is how I feel about it, like some perfectly sampled, rendered and tempered violin playing produced by a synthesizer. It is difficult to feel any personality in that too "perfect" music, and Bruch is perfect in his own turn to amplify that feeling with his first concerto which was composed following the most surprising method. It was rewritten several times under the solicited and welcome influence of several other people, to make sure in a way it would correspond to the ambient taste more than to the composer's unique feelings. And he must have disliked this opportunistic work enough to have sold it, all rights attached, to the publisher of the score, which deprived him of an important income due to the success of this violin concerto. But the impression I develop with this concerto is that it is consensual, in many ways un-emotional, cold. There is not one moment when I feel the wind coming up from the abyss of complete surprise or awe in front of the unheard. What's more the power of the orchestra is excessive, at times over-powering, Germanic some will way, in the line of Wagner's steamrolling intensity. We kind of feel like saying: "Please, what about tenderness? What about romantic delicate sentiments? Is life nothing but a martial march across space and time?" A touch of sweet softness would have deepened the orchestra's performance and enhanced the violin instead of crushing it. Schubert is another story as for the composed music, though the orchestra remains forbiddingly awe-inspiring. But how much would I have liked the violin to cry the tears of millions of eyes since this rondo is so sad, so transcendingly heart-breaking, but Nigel Kennedy is kind of dry and to drown in dry tears is difficult. So that the end that should sound joyful, kind of joyful, appears only as being intensely vivacious. Mendelssohn suffers from the same over-well-tempered temperament. And some chords or sequences I consider as deeply Jewish if not Yiddish evade that depth to sound just plain brilliant. In the famous banquet in the Bible where the guest who arrived without his wedding attire is undressed and thrown into a grilled underground dungeon to become rat-food, the joy of the feasting guests carries the after taste of the rat-chewed flesh of the outcast. Mendelssohn's concerto the way it is performed here is just the banquet's music without the ignoble delicacy of that naked body thrown alive to the rats. We would have seen it as Bohemian but then it would have become tear-shedding, tear-prompting from one eye to the other eye and over two million eyes confronted to some incinerating ovens somewhere in Poland.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines