Part Violin

Appreciation for the compositions from Scandinavian countries seems to be somewhat of an uphill battle. Apart from the works of Grieg and Nielsen, most other composers from this area of the globe are overlooked. This album of violin concertos by Norwegian composers Johan Svendsen and Peter Lange-Müller seeks to break this injustice. Svendsen's concerto makes clear that the composer was himself a violinist; the solo part is very idiomatically written, favoring lyricism over showiness. The orchestral accompaniment is sometimes overbearing and gets in the way of the solo violin's much more interesting and inspired contribution.

Although Nathan Milstein hailed from Odessa, the cradle of Russian violin playing, his personal style was more classical and intellectual in approach than many of his colleagues. By the middle of the twentieth century he had become one of the most renowned violinists in the world, and he did as much as anyone else to imbue Bach's solo violin partitas and sonatas with the rather mystical aura they have presently. Milstein began to study violin at the age of seven. His first teacher was Pyotr Stolyarsky, who remained with him through 1914. Milstein's last recital as a Stolyarsky pupil included another promising student, the five-year-old David Oistrakh. Milstein then went to the St. Petersburg Conservatory to study with Leopold Auer.

These sonatas for violin and continuo, dating from the court of the Holy Roman Empire in Innsbruck in 1660, are little known; perhaps the only other recording of them is a later one by their champion, Andrew Manze. If you like the woolly world of seventeenth century violin music, this composer belongs in your library. The later recording, which includes all the sonatas, lacks the theorbo heard in this 1992 performance, presumably reissued by Channel Classics in order to compete with Harmonia Mundi's release, but both are superb. The music's neglect is largely due to Pandolfi Mealli's obscurity; nothing is known of him beyond this group of works – not even whether a Sicilian composer named Pandolfi working around the same time was the same person or not.

This double-CD group of Mozart violin-and-piano sonatas can stand on its own, and the title merely reads Mozart Violin Sonatas. It is, however, the third installment in a consistently fine Mozart cycle from pianist Cédric Tiberghien and violinist Alina Ibragimova. Deeper in the graphics the sonatas are denoted as being "for keyboard and violin," and indeed it is the keyboard that plays the dominant role even as the ways in which Mozart shakes up this configuration is part of the interest.

On this disc, the playing's the thing and it is fabulous. Originally made in 1979 and 1980, these recordings capture Perlman at his incomparable peak. The effortless perfection of his technique leaves you gasping in disbelief; even the infamously unplayable passages in the Sibelius Finale are tossed off with easy nonchalance, and he avoids the false accents often heard in the treacherous opening theme. And Perlman's toneis warm, mellow, pure, and constantly expressive; its golden glow is like burnished copper on the low strings, like radiant sunshine up high, and he can vary it instantaneously with bow and vibrato to fit the music.

Lolli has received relatively little attention in modern times. I haven’t, for example, been able to trace a single reference to him in the pages of MusicWeb International. Despite this he holds a rather prominent place in that line of Italian violin virtuosi which runs from a figure such as Biagio Marini through Corelli and Tartini to Paganini and Viotti. The musicologist Albert Mell has, not unreasonably, written of him that he “was from many points of view the most important violin virtuoso before Paganini” (Musical Quarterly, Vol. 44, 1958) and Simon McVeigh (in The Cambridge Companion to the Violin) has described him as “the archetypal travelling virtuoso”.

In many performances of the Bartok Solo Sonata its legendary difficulty is more apparent than its beauty and nobility: the violinist sweats profusely in a cloud of resin dust, his bow reduced to a tangle of snapped horse-hair, and the sound he produces is gritty and rebarbative, eloquently expressive of strenuous effort. Nigel Kennedy's account is the most warmly lyrical that I have heard, his tone beautiful and expressive in even the most hair-raising passages.