Samuel Barber, Violin Concerto; William Walton, Violin Concerto; Ernest Bloch, “Baal Shem”; performed by Joshua Bell, violin, the Baltimore Symphony and David Zinman, conductor (London 452 851-2) Barber, Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto, “Souvenirs,” performed by Robert McDuffie (Violin Concerto), Jon Kimura Parker (Piano Concerto), the Atlanta Symphony and Yoel Levi, conductor (Telarc CD-80441)
In 1962, no one would have predicted that, 35 years later, Samuel Barber’s relatively early (1941) violin concerto would have become one of the most frequently performed and recorded of 20th-century concertos and that his mature (1962) piano concerto would be almost forgotten.
In September of 1962, Barber (1910-1981) was riding high. His 1958 opera, “Vanessa,” had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. New York’s Lincoln Center was opening in a blaze of publicity for what was called “A Festival of Visiting Orchestras.”
Pride of place among the orchestras playing in the new Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall had been awarded to the Boston Symphony and Erich Leinsdorf, and the orchestra had commissioned a piano concerto from Barber for the occasion. The soloist was to be John Browning, then surpassed only by Van Cliburn as the most admired of younger American pianists.
The concerto was a brilliant success for Barber and Browning. Audiences loved its tuneful melodies and bravura writing. And many critics called it the most important contribution to the piano-and-orchestra repertory since those of Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Bartok. In its first season, the concerto was performed more than 30 times in the United States and Europe. Two years later, Browning, George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra recorded it.
Despite that impressive beginning, however, the piano concerto practically dropped out of sight. It was to be more than 20 years before any pianist of stature — other than Browning himself — was attracted enough by the Barber to learn it. Even today, in the midst of a huge Barber revival, the only pianists who seem willing to perform it are those who are promised an opportunity to record it — and such opportunities are rare. Jon Kimura Parker’s new version for Telarc makes him only the third pianist, besides Browning, to have recorded it.
The Violin Concerto is quite another story. Its beginnings were humble. Iso Briselli, the violinist for whom it had been written, never performed the piece. (Briselli asked Barber to revise the final movement because he believed it was too insubstantial to support the weightier preceding movements, and Barber refused.) Despite Isaac Stern’s championship of the piece in the late 1950s, the concerto languished in obscurity until about 10 years ago, when everyone began to perform it. These recent performances by Joshua Bell and Robert McDuffie are the 14th and 15th additions to the catalog.
Which of them is more attractive to the buyer depends on how much he wants the piano concerto, which is actually a better work than its now more familiar, older sibling. Parker performs it nicely, if somewhat less excitingly than either Browning or Tedd Joselson. The accompaniment he gets from Levi and the Atlanta orchestra, however, is neither as convincing nor as detailed as those Browning gets from Szell and the Cleveland (Sony Classical) and from Slatkin and the St. Louis (BMG Classics), or that Joselson receives from Andrew Schenck and the London Symphony (ASV).
If the violin concerto is one’s chief priority, I recommend the Bell-Zinman-Baltimore version over the McDuffie-Levi-Atlanta. Bell may be only marginally sweeter in tone and sentiment than the excellent McDuffie, but he receives an orchestral accompaniment that is superior in tightness of ensemble, conviction and insight into the music.
But Bell’s version is still not as attractive as several others, including those by Stern (with Leonard Bernstein on Sony), Perlman (with Seiji Ozawa on EMI), Gil Shaham (with Andre Previn on DG) and Elmar Oliveira (with Slatkin on EMI). The reason is that Bell’s performance of the Walton concerto, on the same record, does not represent the violinist at his best. This is one of the most difficult pieces in the repertory — it was written specifically for Jascha Heifetz, and his two recordings make superfluous those of every other fiddle player.
But even if that were not the case, I would still argue for the versions by Nigel Kennedy (EMI), Lydia Mordkovitch (Chandos) or for those by such veterans as Ida Haendel (Testament) and Aaron Rosand (Harmonia Mundi). Bell was new to the Walton when he recorded it with Zinman, and his inexperience shows — both technically (some of the most difficult sections of the second movement seem glossed over) and interpretively.
Bloch’s “Baal Shem,” which the composer subtitled “three pictures of Chassidic life,” is another story. The young violinist performs this music with enormous assurance and conviction, beautifully matched by Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony, that makes it the best version of the composer’s violin-and-orchestra setting (it was originally written for violin and piano) on records.
Pub Date: 6/01/97
