Britten: Violin Concerto, Chamber Works

Album review

Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky... Isabelle Faust has a formidable track record in acclaimed recordings of the major twentieth century violin concertos, and now she’s partnered with Jakub Hrůša and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to bring us the Britten. Composed for the Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa between 1938 and 1939, this is a work the 24 year old composer began just before leaving Europe for the States, and completed the following year in New York. Brosa then premiered it in 1940, at Carnegie Hall. Faust’s recording is a live one, captured in 2021 at the Munich Isarphilharmonie, after which the second half of her programme sees her enter the studio with her time-honoured duo partner, pianist Alexander Melnikov, for a chamber programme presenting the two other works Britten wrote for Brosa just before the concerto: Reveille, premiered in 1937 at London’s Wigmore Hall, over which the violin line’s gradual awakening is apparently Britten’s fond joke over the time it took Brosa to get out of bed in the morning; then the four-movement Suite which the two friends premiered in Barcelona the previous year, just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Incredibly, this appears to be the first time that an artist has put the three Britten-Brosa works together on the same recording, unless you count compendiums. But the sense of freshness doesn’t even stop there, because Faust and Melnikov then conclude the album by joining with Faust’s violist brother, Boris Faust, for the world premiere recording of Britten’s Two Pieces for violin, viola and piano, written in 1929 just after his sixteenth birthday, but not published until 2013.
Faust and Hrůša leave no emotional stone unturned over this broadly conceived, meticulously shaped and detailed concerto reading. And it verily prickles, end to end, with energy both latent and full-throttle, intellectual and physical.
When the American composer Elliott Carter reviewed the Violin Concerto’s premiere, he sensed an autobiographical element – pacifist Britten’s personal response to the politics and war in Europe. You very much get that feeling here. The Vivace is a true dance of death – listen to the orchestra’s deadly, Dies irae-esque snap and swing onwards from 1’45”, and the quavering wail of Faust’s response. The hall and capturing make their own eerie contributions to the drama too, notably around 3’30” as the piccolos bleed into the air high above the tuba; followed by the mighty orchestral climax into Faust’s fabulously paced and coloured cadenza.
Equally audible is Britten’s homage to Brosa’s Spanish heritage, beginning with the dancing lilt and sun-flecked radiance with which the orchestra, then Faust, handles the concerto’s very opening motif; and then how perfect for the first chamber work to be Reveille, with its own, now more peaceful, Spanish lilt, Faust’s lithely winding, improvisatory-feeling, pizzicato-peppered long lines representing a feast of tones and timbres, flitting between husky and silvery, to poetic support from Melnikov. For an especially supreme piece of duo work, head to the Suite’s concluding Waltz, with its drama-rich succession of deftly handled contrasting moods, textures, tempi and metres. Then with the Two Pieces we have two different brands of lucid, watery beauty, played out via tightly intertwined dialogue, pleasures including the way the Faust siblings match tones one moment, and contrast the next. Honestly, what a cracker of a recording. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz