Adams & Korngold : Violin Concertos

Album review

Precisely the year John Adams was born, 1947, none else than Heifetz premiered Korngold’s Violin Concerto which star-violinist Ilya Gringolts plays on this Album, together with Adams’ own Concerto written 1993. Stylistically, these two works are polar opposites, but with a common emphasis on melody – and a common rejection of the ascendancy of atonality and serial techniques. John Adams is a composer who does not like to be pinned down. Being branded a minimalist has not suited him any better than did the confines of his training in the twelve-tone system while he was a student at Harvard. The term itself is a bit of a misnomer, and one might prefer the term “Pattern and Process” music, which highlights the tendency of these composers to set patterns in motion within dense, rhythmically complex textures, and then gradually morph these patterns over time. In the case of his Violin Concerto, the metamorphoses are so subtle that it is well-nigh impossible to trace any repetitive principle whatever, even though it is present. As for Korngold’s Violin Concerto, it might also be called “hypermelodic”. The composer himself noted that the concerto, “with its many melodic and lyric episodes, was contemplated rather for a Caruso of the violin than for a Paganini.” Written at a time in music history where atonality held nearly undisputed sway in musically sophisticated circles (Korngold’s music is emphatically tonal, if harmonically complex), the work was the first in what Korngold hoped would be his triumphant return to concert music, after a long and celebrated career as Hollywood’s preeminent film composer. The piece contains material in each of its three movements from several of Korngold’s film scores; but it would have been a pity indeed to waste such exquisite melodies to a mere movie, and self-recycling of good materials has been around for centuries, even Bach himself being a great self-recycler, an irrefutable role-modem. (c) SM/Qobuz