Britten • Elgar Britten: Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Op. 33a; Elgar: Violin Concerto in B minor Michael Barenboim (violin); Philharmonia Orchestra/Alessandro Crudele Linn Records CKD729 67:52 mins
Among devotees of Elgar’s Violin Concerto, there can be almost a cult of the music’s elusiveness – as if every performance or recording must by its nature fall short of doing justice to the work’s interplay of large-scale design, virtuoso solo demands and the personal and private sensibility at its heart. This is partly true, and also unfair: in any musical masterwork, there are different ways of doing things, and world-class performers are in the business of finding them. While Michael Barenboim’s approach is untypical of what might be thought of as wistful English tradition, it nonetheless has impressive strengths of its own.
The solo violin’s first entry sets out Barenboim’s terms – wonderful tawny-brown tone-colour, clear but unexaggerated attack, and rather more sliding expressive portamento than is standard today (but was very much standard in Elgar’s time). Besides superb technical command, there’s real engagement with the music’s central strand of lyrical warmth, if rather less of a sense of great and quiet spaces opening out around this (which a truly special performance somehow has). This may partly be because Alessandro Crudele’s conducting – thoughtful and likeable, and securing a quality contribution from the Philharmonia – can be a touch prosaic in key moments. He sounds much more at home in Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes: the alternating poetry and drama of ‘Dawn’ are memorably captured, with ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘Moonlight’ equally fine, although ‘Storm’ (meaning the one in Peter Grimes’s mind) sounds less wild than it might.
Malcolm Hayes