Critic’s Notebook: A Damp Squib with the Vienna Symphony

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Musikverein: Eine verpasste Chance mit den Wiener Symphonikern

D.Shostakovich, Violin Concerto Alina Ibragimova V.Jurowski / Russian State Academic SO hyperion

C.Debussy, La Mer (et al.) D.Gatti / ONdeFrance Sony

M.Ravel, La valse (et al.) S.Celibidache / MPhil MPhil Archive

Isabelle Faust’s Shostakovich could have been a major moment — but never got the support it needed

After a special evening at the with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (see review), it was back to meat-and-potatoes on Thursday. The ingredients sounded promising enough, for a concert with the Vienna Symphony in which Isabelle Faust would perform Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto. And she certainly wasn’t the problem: her contribution had the ears prick up, whether it was the plaintive, lamenting tone she drew from her instrument by way of strategically wide vibrato — penetrating and tender all at once — or her mercilessly instant, stone-faced gear-shift into an aggressively hard-edged sound. Even at moderate tempos, Faust managed to carry a good deal of precarious tension across from the Adagio of the second movement into the Adagio of the third. That wasn’t enough to save Shostakovich’s astringent late work, however.

And it’s not even that the VSO played badly. In fact, they played solidly enough, no major blunders, and conductor Alain Altinoglu at least seemed engaged and trying hard. But whether in the prelude to Khovanshchina (where the thin violin sound didn’t help), or in Debussy’s La Mer, the results were uniformly dull, the results were eye-wateringly boring: the sound was murky, the energy sluggish, the atmosphere in the hall unsettled. The orchestra sounded like it was on autopilot — as if this were just another rehearsal-free repertoire run-through over at the State Opera. Tremolos remained tremolos and never lifted off the strings, becoming a shimmering iridescence. Dynamic shadings felt merely mechanical. Any Fortissimo wasn’t majestic — just loud. Where mystery was called for, we got mezzo piano.

At least Ravel’s La Valse is more or less impossible to ruin. Here it stumbled along with the grace of a drunken elephant — which, after all, rather suits it. But the veil that had lowered between orchestra and audience — and somehow also between orchestra and conductor — never lifted again.


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Dip Your Ears: No. 278 (Freiburgian Schumann Glory)

Robert Schumann Violin Concerto, Piano Trio No.3 Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov, Jean Guihen Queyras Freiburg Baroque Orchestra Pablo Heras-Casado (Harmonia Mundi, 2015)

Schumann Glory: Violin Concerto Edition

There are neglected works by great composers, fitfully revived and let go again and rightfully forgotten. Fewer are the works by great composers once ignored and only now rediscovered as masterpieces. Enter Schumann’s Violin Concerto. Clara Schumann, following Joseph Joachim’s advice, suppressed it. Unplayable. Drab. Tiresomely repetitive. Awkward. It’s half a miracle she didn’t burn it. And still performances remain rare. This disc might be the concerto’s best chance to change this! Isabelle Faust’s hushed gentility and her faint, otherworldly touches bring the ears to their knees with the Ghost Variation motif. The following emergence out of this gorgeous, troubled netherworld of Schumann’s mind is all the more invigorating. The Piano Trio is a stupendous bonus; the first in what might be the next touchstone set of three!

(Since then, these artists have completed the trio of concertos coupled with the trio of Piano Trios – and the happy result has been conveniently boxed.) .

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Briefly Noted: Schumann for Four and Five (CD of the Month)

Schumann, Piano Quartet/Piano Quintet, I. Faust, A.K. Schreiber, A. Tamestit, J.-G. Queyras, A. Melnikov (released on November 24, 2023) Harmonia Mundi HMM902695 | 52'42"

Many musicologists have described Robert Schumann's youthful piano quartet and piano quintet as twin works, not least because they were composed in the same key, E-flat major, and within a few weeks of one another. Neither of these pieces, early experiments by Schumann with pairing his favorite instrument, the piano, with different combination of string instruments, lasts over a half-hour, but the young composer, still only 19 years old, laid the foundations for many later examples of both of these still relatively rare genres.

This delectable new release assembles a dream team for these exemplary works: violinist Isabelle Faust, violist Antoine Tamestit, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, and pianist Alexander Melnikov. All play on historical instruments, with the strings all made roughly around the year 1700, as early as 1672, in the case of Tamestit's Stradivarius viola. Melnikov plays on a historical fortepiano made by Ignace Pleyel (Paris, 1851), technically constructed after Schumann composed these pieces, but that is a minor point.

Even though it was composed slightly later, the quartet is the lesser work to my ears, but its slow movement, with ardent cello solos here played subtly by Queyras, is nothing short of gorgeous. Schumann's piano quintet, however, has always struck me as one of the most perfect pieces of chamber music ever written. This performance, with Anne Katharina Schreiber joining on second violin, is going to be rather difficult to improve on, and it is certainly in competition with Melnikov's own recording of the same pairing from a decade ago (with the Jerusalem String Quartet) and the version made around the same time by the Takács Quartet and Marc-André Hamelin. The second movement surprises, both by the detached, somewhat brisk pacing of the funeral march and the understated rubato of the B section. The use of historical instruments and the individual strengths of each player put this disc a notch above.

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Briefly Noted: Faust Channels Locatelli

P. Locatelli, Violin Concertos / Concerti Grossi, I. Faust, Il Giardino Armonico, G. Antonini (released on August 25, 2023) Harmonia Mundi HMM902398 | 68'22"

If you've heard of Pietro Locatelli, it is likely as part of a list of other 18th-century violinist-composers in the mold of Corelli and Vivaldi: one of those Italian -i names. At most, early music groups will include a Locatelli piece along with more famous composers in a program from time to time. So be prepared to be wowed when you take in the latest disc from Il Giardino Armonico and the mesmerizing violinist Isabelle Faust, which is devoted entirely to the works of this under-played composer. He was born in Bergamo in 1695, but his peregrinations took him from Rome, where he trained, throughout Italy and Germany and eventually to Amsterdam, where he died in 1764.

This recording features two of Locatelli's concerti grossi, including the intriguing and intensely introspective Op. 7, no. 6, given the subtitle "Il pianto d'Arianna." Likely a sort of programmatic setting of an unknown text about the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus, it is a sort of quasi-operatic instrumental drama: conductor Giovanni Antonini compares its structure to that of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna for clues to each movement's meaning. Broken into ten movements, the first five, all quite short and featuring turbulent contrasts, are joined together here in a single track. The ensemble's lead violinist, Stefano Barneschi, takes the second solo violin parts under Faust in this and the less noteworthy Op. 1, no. 11, with opulent results.

While the concerti grossi emphasize Locatelli's melodic invention and musicality, two solo violin concerti showcase his other compositional side, the virtuosic exploits of a true showman. Locatelli ornamented his solo concertos with astounding cadenzas, each of which he gave the title of Capriccio. These Capricci, twenty-four in number, are an important forerunner of and likely influence on Paganini's 24 Caprices. Faust is magical in the insane runs of whistle-tone harmonics in the Capriccio from the first movement of Op. 3, no. 11. Likewise, she somehow navigates the perilous extended positions in the Capriccio for the third movement, so high in range that it reminds one of the anecdote that Locatelli once stunned a canary off its perch with his sound. Melodically these pieces are often as dull as a Hanon exercise, but the facility of the playing is nothing less than amazing. Locatelli also often marked a fermata in places where the soloist was meant to improvise, and here Faust plays written-out cadenzas by Godefridus Domenicus Reber from an edition of 1743.

As Faust puts it in her booklet essay on the solo concertos, these excessive cadenzas "are of such great technical difficulty that Locatelli expressly left it up to the performer whether to play them or not. He was obviously aware that not every violinist’s hand could master these cadenzas." Fortunately with Faust, her hands are up to the challenge. The tender Pastorale movement from another concerto grosso, Op. 1, no. 8, serves as an encore to cool down the strings.


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