Schnittke: Concerto for 3 - Langer: Platch - Mozetich: Affairs of the Heart - Bennett: Sometimes it Rains

Album review

Russian violinist Roman Mints has made a specialty of playing new music, and on this album he plays three concertos written around the turn of the millennium. The title of Canadian composer Marjan Mozetich's Affairs of the Heart gives hint of the work's unabashedly Romantic idiom. Mozetich began his career steeped in modernism, but later turned to a more overtly emotional and expressive musical language, and absorbed the kind of minimalism associated with Philip Glass. Parts of his single-movement concerto sound derivative of Glass in it harmonic and rhythmic patterns, and other parts are purely neo-romantic. Elena Langer, a Russian composer who has settled in Britain, is more strongly eclectic, and doesn't shun the abstractions of modernism in her two-movement concerto, Platch (Crying). The second movement is ethereally beautiful, the violin soulfully keening in its highest register over a very slowly evolving orchestral murmur. Schnittke's 1994 Concerto for Three features violin, viola, and cello, each with a movement of its own before coming together in the fourth and fifth movements. Intriguingly, Schnittke put no dynamic markings in the score, leaving that parameter entirely to the discretion of the performers. The concerto is written largely in Schnittke's expressive but astringent late idiom, but at the very end he throws in a touch of his characteristic polystylism, with the soloists playing an exquisitely elegant but slightly out-of-kilter minuet, unaccompanied by the orchestra. Mints displays absolute mastery in each of the works, playing with secure intonation, full tone, and interpretive warmth. He is capably joined in the Schnittke by violist Maxim Rysanov and cellist Kristine Blaumane. Mikel Toms conducts the New Prague Sinfonia in the Mozetich and the West Kazakhstan Philharmonic Orchestra in the Langer and Schnittke in nuanced and committed performances. As a bonus track, the album includes Ed Bennett's evocative Sometimes it Rains, from Mints' earlier CD, Game Over: Works for violin and electronics. The CD, particularly Langer's deeply felt concerto, should be of strong interest to fans of new music for violin and orchestra.

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