Customer Reviews

Shchedrin: Concerto Cantabile / Stravinsky: Violin Concerto in D / Tchaikovsky: Serenade melancholique,Op.26 ~ Vengerov

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have several different recordings of Stravinsky's remarkable VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D, including Anne-Sophie Mutter's top drawer performance. It is, undoubtedly, one of the finest concertos of the 20th century and if you are lucky enough to live in New York, you can see George Balanchine's brilliant ballet set to this music at The New York City Ballet. In this ballet, as the master choreographer said, one can "see the music."

Beautiful and simple, severe and yet highly emotional in Stravinsky's "neo-classic" style, this is a piece of music that the listener can return to over and over again and be fulfilled. It is nothing to be "feared" by people who think the 20th century only brought abstraction to the arts.

The combination of Maxim Vengerov, not yet 30 years old, and Mstislav Rostropovich, almost 70 years old, is absolutely unbeatable. I thought, at first, I was listening to a live concert recording, it was that exciting. This is a recording to treasure

The companion piece, Shchedrin's CONCERTO CANTABILE is new to me and positively beautiful. Rounding out this all Russian program is Tchaikovsky's lovely, more traditionally lyrical SERENADE MELANCOLIQUE.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The 'Schedrin'piece is haunting; the "Stravinsky" infectious, and the 'Tchaikovsky' simply beautiful.

The Amazon reviewer has given us the background of Vengerov's very productive relationship with Rostropovich, and this CD reveals how the two spark each other off musically. The Stravinsky is a riot of slashes and swoops one never hears in this neoclassical work, alternating with sudden slides that I'm sure Stravinsky hardly imagined. It makes for a romantic encounter with the century's most anti-romantic composer. Come swoon over Maxim, and why not?

But first you have to troll thorugh the still waters of the Shchderin, whose "modernism" is fifteen minutes ahead of Fritz Kreisler and fifteeen years behind WW II. The operative question with this composer is just how junky his music will be this time around. In the Concreto Cantabile composed for Vengerov we get the Russian version of Corigliano's Red Violin movie socre--long legato lines interspersed with showy fiddling--but much less melodically inspired. If you're going to be this retrograde, it helps to carry a tune.

As filler we get the Tchaikovsky Serenade Melacholique, which is essentially a wordless aria in the melodic style of Eugene Onegin. Vengerov plays it to the manner born, and although the most minor thing on this CD, the Tchaikovsky makes you feel that Oistrakh has found his spiritual godson.

EMI's sonics are close and larger-than-life, which makes for great impact but also turns Vengerov's tone somewhat coarse and metallic at times. In any event, for anyone who comes for the Stravinsky, this could be the performance of a lifetime.

I agree with the other reviewers that this is an excellent performance. However, I purchased the mp3 album and in the first track (first movement of the Shchedrin Concerto) the sound cuts out between seconds 39 to 45 of play. This happens when played through the Amazon Cloud Player on my desktop PC, my laptop PC or via the Amazon mp3 app on my smart phone. The same happens if the mp3 is downloaded to my computer and played with either the windows media player or i-tunes. I contacted Amazon Customer service and they reset the album so I could get another copy using the Amazon mp3 downloader or listen through the Amazon Cloud Player. The same problem still occured. The customer service rep said that there may be a problem with the mp3 file itself and that they would look into it further.

Anyone else have this problem?

I'll give this 5 stars for the quality of the performance and hope that Amazon will eventually get me a defect-free mp3 of the first track.

One of the reviewers that opined on the works recorded on this CD is still stuck in a mindset that has cursed Western-oriented art music for decades.

He or she believes there is something called progress in art music. As a result, if a composer like Sibelius, Langgaard, etc. could not "keep-up-with-the-times," their creative efforts were increasingly labeled as secondary to those composers who supposedly were fashionable, or modern.

Unfortunately, this has generated a huge disconnect between cognitively more complex composers and their possible audience. The Soviet authorities attempted to prevent this disconnect. And they were somewhat successful.

If one performs a work by a past Soviet composer who attempted to be authentic, melodious, and communicative as possible under the cultural-political restrictions of the 1930s to 50s, most music lovers would prefer a performance of that music over the performance of a composer representing the "progressive" or avant garde schools of composition of the same time period.

One could say that those who lost their "groove" by attempting to follow the fashions of academic musical cliques, musical pundits, etc. have followed the dictates of a "modernism" that was (and is)even more thorough and exclusive than anything handed down during Stalinist period in the SU.

Unfortunately, this attitude has been with us for centuries. Remember, after he died, very few people performed or listened to the music of that old fogey J.S. Bach. Why? Because he was deemed old fashioned. He was horribly antiquated.

However, many of us in the West are finally leaving the "modernist" attitudes behind; by so doing, we are discovering a huge amount of attractive, shocking, wild, hard-hitting, very tonal, etc. music that had been ignored until now.

If a composer attempts to create, communicate and share his or her creative vision as authentically as they can (with a regard for centuries of musical craftspersonship), that composer probably is worth listening to...no matter what his or her compositional style.

We presently live in a world dominated by a globally inauthentic, commercially debased and lowest-common denomenator culture. We must search for that rare authentic, creative and skilled voice wherever we can find and hear it.