CD, стоящие на полке рядом : Classics (Modern Classics)      

While this recording is wholly welcome, it is less wholly than necessary. Both works are among the handful of great English string concertos, but because there are few recordings of Britten's Violin Concerto and fewer still recordings of Walton's Viola Concerto, a great recording of either work would be a wonderful thing. But while Maxim Vengerov is a very fine player with some outstanding recordings to his credit, neither of these recordings are among them. Both are good enough and anyone who didn't already know the works would be more than happy with either one. But in neither work does Vengerov do more than turn in a better than average performance. His Britten concerto is well-played and catches much of the work's lyrical drama, but compared with Theo Olof's heart-wrenching 1948 recording with John Barbirolli or Mark Lubotsky's exquisite 1970 recording with Britten himself conducting, Vengerov is an interpretive lightweight. His Walton Viola Concerto is likewise well-played and grandly melancholic, but compared with William Primrose's profoundly moving 1943 recording with Andrew Walton or Nigel Kennedy's supremely lyrical 1994 recording with Andre Previn, Vengerov is again an interpretive lightweight. Nor is Mstislav Rostropovich conducting much of an incentive. Never much more than a capable conductor, Rostropovich is out of his depth in these works and even the superb London Symphony Orchestra can cover for his sloppy attacks and approximate balances. Nor is EMI's 2002 digital sound an improvement over the superb stereo sound of Lubotsky's Decca recording or even EMI's own digital sound for Kennedy.

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Britten: Violin Concerto

Walton: Viola Concerto

These concertos were composed almost exactly ten years apart (Walton was 26, Britten 25). Deeply expressive in their different ways, they forced critics to reassess their respective composers, who had first been tagged as clever and satirical rather than emotionally committed. Their ground-plan is similar: a moderately-paced, predominantly lyrical first movement precedes a brilliant, highly rhythmic central scherzo and the main expressive burden is thrown onto a wide-ranging finale, which sums up the argument of the whole work. This design, very unlike that of the great concertos of the Classical and Romantic eras, had been used by Sergei Prokofiev for his First Violin Concerto of 1916-17; it seems likely that Walton and Britten took note of this striking contemporary model. Their concertos play resourcefully with the emotional complexity to be gained from a continual equivocation between major and minor, even in their principal keys (A in Walton's case, D in Britten's; in both works, the scherzo is in E minor).

Britten's Violin Concerto, begun in November 1938, was finished a few days after the Second World War broke out. The premiere was given in New York on 29 March 1940 by the Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa (a refugee from the Franco regime) with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Barbirolli. During the 1950s Britten made a revised version, including a modification of the violin part prepared with the assistance of Manoug Parikian.

Britten had met Brosa in the mid-1930s and performed with him in Barcelona in 1936 shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, whose fateful climax (with the defeat of the democratic forces) came as Britten worked on his concerto. The threatening international situation, with World War ever more inevitably on the horizon, surely coloured his inspiration. Despite moments of brilliance and high lyricism the concerto is an elegiac, dark-hued work, whose heartfelt expression strives to defend itself from irony, parody and worse.

The long, crooning Violin melody that begins the first movement is heard over a nagging drum-rhythm: a reminder perhaps of Beethoven's Violin Concerto except that (according to Brosa) the rhythm is specifically Spanish. Taken up by bassoon and other instruments, it persists obstinately through long paragraphs, a hint of spectral flamenco that defines the violin's song as essentially a lament, disrupted - but not displaced - by the more militaristic and percussive secondary theme. The ensuing scherzo has the character of a wild moto perpetuo, rivalling Prokofiev (unmistakably recalled here) in acid virtuosity while outdoing him in orchestral invention. The movement culminates in an impressive cadenza, recalling the flamenco rhythm from the first movement and acting as a bridge straight into the finale.

Britten cast this, unusually, as a passacaglia: variations on a ground bass, in the Baroque chaconne tradition of Purcell and J.S. Bach. The movement accumulates sombre power as the tonally unstable bass theme, first announced by trombone, descends by a semitone on each appearance, continually opening out the harmonic perspective. The individual variations subsume characters of song, dance, capriccio and military march into the onward flow, but their occasional hints of elegance and lightness are eventually frozen out by an ever-deeper mood of lamentation. By the end, the ground bass is reduced to chant-like reminiscences and the violin is left centre-stage, soaring on high in a mood of inconsolable threnody.

Walton composed his Viola Concerto in winter 1928-9, at the suggestion of Thomas Beecham, for the viola virtuoso Lionel Tertis. In the event Tertis declared Walton's work impossible: but the premiere went ahead on 3 October 1929 at Queen's Hall, London. Henry Wood conducted, and the soloist was the versatile German viola player and composer Paul Hindemith, who had already written a viola concerto of his own. Walton's work was an immediate success. (Tertis had the grace to edit the solo part for its subsequent publication.) In 1961 Walton revised the score, reducing the size of the orchestra but adding a part for harp. This new version was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in January 1962 by John Couling with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Malcolm Sargent.

The first movement, as mentioned above, is comparatively short and restrained in expression - so restrained, indeed, that the viola has no cadenza. The atmosphere is pensive and rather melancholic, expressed in flowing melodic lines of notable plasticity: such as the long first subject, announced by the viola against a dark-hued orchestral background. Its initial leap of a minor third sets the tone for much of the concerto: tonality flickers backwards and forwards between major and minor, with pathetic effect. Just as important as the principal subjects of this compressed sonata form is a plangent motif of consecutive sixths, often in double-stopping on the viola, which is used and extended in many ways.

There follows a brilliant, mercurial scherzo in rondo form, agile and highly inventive, full of bravura writing for the soloist and the orchestra, which here unleashes its full power for the first time. Restlessly moving from episode to episode, the music encompasses breaks of jazzy rhythm, swift bursts of fanfare, and a rumbustious and rather nautical tune with more than a hint of a hornpipe.

The finale, starting with a perky march-like theme in solo bassoon (a close parallel, this, to the Prokofiev concerto), soon moves into more lyrical material - indeed the second subject, with its melancholy double-stopped sixths, is clearly reminiscent of the first movement. The march-rhythm provides the motive power for an eventful development with much contrapuntal elaboration and side-shafts of nostalgia in the viola's eloquent solo episodes. The recapitulation ushers in a big, majestically passionate orchestral tutti. After this the bassoon theme is reduced to a mere accompaniment as the viola takes up once more the opening theme of the first movement and steers the concerto to a sweetly sad, ecstatic close.

-Malcolm MacDonald, 2003