COMPOSERS: Adams,Corigliano,Enescu,Waxman
LABELS: Naxos
ALBUM TITLE: John Adams
WORKS: Violin Concerto
PERFORMER: Chloë Hanslip (violin), Charles Owen (piano); Royal PO/Leonard Slatkin
CATALOGUE NO: 8.559302
It’s excellent sense to couple John
Adams’s Violin Concerto with John
Corigliano’s Chaconne based on his
film music for The Red Violin. Both
require bravura of the highest order;
Adams’s work has been one of the
most stunningly successful recent
concertos in the grand manner,
and Corigliano’s piece is one of his
strongest, the chaconne form lending
PATRICK DE SPIEGELAERE
Revealing Ravel
roger nichols relishes Ravel’s authentic colours and style
focus and backbone to his invention.
And the Adams too centres on a
big chaconne, the haunting ‘Body
Through Which the Dream Flows’.
But the two Franz Waxman pieces,
completing what Naxos overoptimistically
terms this ‘broad
survey of American violin music’,
make curious fillers. Waxman’s
two-minute reworking of part of
Enescu’s first Romanian Rhapsody
has no sensible function except as
an eccentric encore. His Tristan and
Isolde Fantasia, created for the 1946
film Humoresque, is an efficientenough
pot-pourri on Wagner’s
themes, sugared with solo violin, but
the almost-as-prominent piano part
adds a teensy touch of tawdriness
– which does not, however, disturb
the purity of Chloë Hanslip’s tone.
This is the fourth recording
of the Adams Concerto. The
first, by Gidon Kremer with the
Orchestra of St Luke’s on Nonesuch,
remains dazzling in the cruelly
demanding solo part, but Kremer
is uncomfortably spotlit by the
recording; Hanslip, better balanced
and with much more orchestral
detail apparent, gives few points
away to him in virtuosity, even in the
frenetic perpetuum mobile finale, and
she seems superior in eloquence to
Robert McDuffie with the Houston
Symphony on Telarc. In the absence
of Leila Josefowicz’s superb account
on the short-lived Late Junction
label, Hanslip’s new version seems to
me undoubtedly the one to acquire.
Calum MacDonald