“Beautiful Sheen”
By Helmuth Fiedler
Afterward, a rarity
with the Dutch violinist Janine Jansen as soloist: Benjamin Britten’s Violin
concerto Op. 15 of 1939, for which the earliest one (performance) was by Ida
Haendel, more recently by Frank Peter Zimmermann and Maxim Vengerov.
Stylistically, the
Britten Concerto holds up a mask to Prokofiev in its Vivace, the Passacaglia
finale at the outset recalls Alban Berg.
In any case, the virtuoso demands are enormous. The young Britten also learned much from the
pieces of an Edouard Lalo or Camille Saint-Saens. Yet the sheer overwhelming technical demands
presented no problem at all to the 30-year-old Echo-laureate Janine
Jansen. Whereas also, with her exquisite
singing tone she precisely brought out the gently elegiac moments of the work
on her 1727 Barrere Stradivarius.
In Franz Schubert’s
great C-Major Symphony the CSO was finally free to blossom. It could take the right start in the lengthy
first movement in order to resonate with slender brass sonority at the crest of
the coda. Scarcely less persuasive, (was)
how Järvi dispersed the orchestral timbres in Schubert’s singular harmonies. The change of mood, the seamless connection
between strings and woodwinds. as well as the dramatic heightening leading into
a feverish outcry stopped the breath, before the cellos in major-saturated simplicity
led the way back into the world of beautiful sheens. The following encore of Brahms’ Sixth
Hungarian Dance was cracking (good).
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German text:
Cincinnati Symphony mit Järvi