Mozart: Violin Concertos Nos. 4 & 5

Album review

Danish violinist-turned-conductor Nikolaj Znaider, who won the prestigious Reine Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 1997, has decided to record Mozart’s complete violin concertos, conducted from the violin with the London Symphony Orchestra. Znaider has a particularly strong relationship with that orchestra, with which he has been performing as a soloist since 2005, and as a conductor since 2011. For his Mozart project, he has of coursed reduced the orchestra’s string section to a more Mozartian, nearly chamberlike size, so that the solo violin weaves seamlessly into the delicate musical fabric, as if it were some kind of “primus inter pares”. This is a particularly deft approach to those two magnificient scores, both written in 1775, and their youthfulness – the composer was but 19 years old – is contradicted by their astonishing broadness of scope: the Fifth concerto lasts about half an hour, a very unusual length for a concertante work at that time. Znaider plays them in such a way that their “lengths” seems absolutely “divine”, Mozart thus predating Schubert by some decades… © SM/Qobuz