Saint-Georges: Violin Concertos, Opp. 2 & 7

Fumika Mohri, Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra, Pardubice and Michael Halasz

Released on 6/9/23 by Naxos
Main artists: Mohri Fumika Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra, Pardubice Michael Halasz
Genre: Concertos

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Recordings of music by the Black Guadaloupean-born composer Joseph Bologne (or Boulogne), Chevalier de Saint-Georges, have proliferated with the release of the 2022 biopic Chevalier. The budget label Naxos has gotten in on the action, and this release -- by violinist Fumika Mohri and the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice -- hit classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2023. It makes as good a place as any to start with the music of Saint-Georges, who was not a prolific composer. This is unsurprising, inasmuch as he also achieve fame as a fencer, dancer marksman (future U.S. president John Adams wrote that he could shoot a coin out of the air), teacher (among his students was Marie Antoinette), and most often of all virtuoso violinist. The concertos on this album, written for his own use but later published and apparently successful, show him at his best as a composer. Saint-Georges was sometimes known as the Black Mozart. It is hard to disentangle the strands of influence in the crowded French scene of the 1770s, but it seems at least plausible that Saint-Georges' Op. 2 concertos of 1772 influenced the violin concerts of Mozart, written several years later. The dimensions of the first movements of the two Op. 2 concertos are large, with orchestral expositions that depart from and return to the home key; Mozart met Saint-Georges and may well have heard these works and been impressed by their expansive structures. They are not virtuoso works, but the solo parts bloom attractively into high lines with double-stopping. Violinist Mohri, in her recording debut, plays the works with an attractive straightforwardness, catching but not overdoing the sweetness of the French style, and the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice and conductor Michael Halász are old hands in the music of this period and accompany her cleanly. A strong pick throughout from among the profusion of Saint-Georges recordings.
© James Manheim /TiVo

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Saint-Georges: Violin Concertos, Opp. 2 & 7

Mohri Fumika

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Violin Concerto in G Major, Op. 2 No. 1: I. Allegro