CLASSICAL : Eloquent connection

CLASSICAL : Eloquent connection.

SZYMANOWSKI: Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35; MARTINU: Violin Concerto No. 2, H. 293; BARTOK: Two Portraits, Op, 5. Jennifer Koh (violin), Grant Park Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kalmar. Cedille CD CDR 90000 089

UNG-AANG TALAY

Karol Szymanowski's First Violin Concerto is such a favourite in the Talay household that the family culture shelf is groaning under the weight of a slew of different recordings. It is hard to imagine anyone who hears this piece, which sounds like the soundtrack to an ecstatic dream, not getting hooked on it.

Unfortunately, the two recorded performances that enter into the music's magical sound world most fully - Wilkomirska/Rowicki on the Muza label and Danczowska/Kord on Accord - have been out of print for some time. Both were performed by Polish women artists who were steeped in their compatriot's subtle, highly elusive style, and with Polish conductors on the podium.

But now a new recording that ranks with theirs has come from a very different source. The young Chinese-American violinist Jennifer Koh shows herself here to be a masterful Szymanowski interpreter, and her intense response to this gorgeous score is matched by that of conductor Carlos Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra, a festival ensemble who are obviously inspired by it.

Szymanowski's middle-period style is hard to describe. Works like this concerto and the Third Symphony ("Song of the Night") have a uniquely "Szymanowski-esque" phantasmagorical quality, scintillating with iridescent colour. I read one discussion of it whose writer felt that if Mahler had written a violin concerto, it might have sounded like this, but to me its emotional world is remote from Mahler's. The closest comparison might be to parts of Debussy's Jeux or to certain passages in Stravinsky's The Firebird or Bartok's The Wooden Prince, but Szymanowski rarefies the mood further and imparts a rapt quality that is all his own.

Listen to the opening bars of the concerto as played here, where the orchestra chatters and rustles with fleeting sounds that suggest an enchanted nocturnal landscape into which the violin enters (at 0:37 in this performance) with a luminous, singing melody so magically played here by Koh that as soon as it began I realised that the performances were going to be extraordinary.

Her impeccable technique allows her to effortlessly negotiate the many passages in the concerto where the violin's floating line ascends into the stratosphere - just after 12:00, for example - without the tiniest flaw in intonation. But technique is a secondary concern here. What distinguished Koh's performance is her pitch-perfect response to its mood of euphoric, controlled delirium. Here she has the edge on such other distinguished interpreters as Thomas Zehetmair (with Simon Rattle on EMI) and Lydia Mordkovitch (with Vasili Sinaiski on Chandos). Kord and his Grant Park forces, aided by excellent engineering, never overwhelm her while exactly complementing her interpretation. Superb.

Bohuslav Martinu's Second Violin Concerto, after some ominous and monumental opening moments, settles in its first movement into an open, songful style very different from Szymanowski's glittering nightscape. At times the composer's Czech heritage comes to the fore. The orchestral passage beginning here at 3:58, harmonised slightly differently, could almost fit into Smetana's Ma Vlast.

Once again, Koh connects eloquently with the composer's style. Martinu's concerto is real-world music, and her response to it is appropriately lyrical, but open and direct. Her tone, otherworldly in the Szymanowski, is full and warm here. Listen to her way with the generous melody that begins at around 5:45 of the first movement, and to the songlike theme that starts after 1:00 in the gentle, pastoral-sounding one that follows.

The finale, an extroverted movement full of fanfares that sometimes have a Coplandesque tinge (the concerto was complete in 1943, when the American composer's most popular style was in full flower), makes strong technical demands on the soloist, met here with elan, and brings the piece to a triumphant conclusion.

Koh's programme concludes with Bartok's early Two Portraits. The first of these also served as the first movement of Bartok's First Violin Concerto, a work that he suppressed. As Andrea Lamoreaux explains in her comprehensive notes to this disc, it was largely a response to his failed love affair with the young violinist Steffi Geyer.

The first movement, which begins as a violin solo, evolves into a tentative partnership into which the orchestra enters only gradually, with much imitative counterpoint, then culminates in an impassioned climax before subsiding into a serene conclusion. The violin is silent in the brief second portrait. Bartok subtitled it Distorted (the first portrait is Idealistic), and its dissonant, sarcastic scoring savages the lyrical material used in the first portrait - Bartok's angry response to the collapse of his affair with Geyer.

Here Koh is up against very stiff competition from Shlomo Mintz/ Claudio Abbado on DG. Abbado takes a somewhat tougher view of the second portrait than Kalmar does, but the neither of the two violinists yields anything to the other, so no clear preference here.

This CD is a must-buy for anyone who has read this far. It went straight into my iPod, the only kind of praise I can give it that seems to mean anything these days. It can be obtained from amazon.com and other online retailers, but act fast because classical CDs from small companies tend to flash in and out of print at a quick rate.

Bangkok Post
Friday January 12, 2007