May 7, 2018

  • Tetzlaff Tackles Bartok

    Bartok: Violin Concerti

    Christian Tetzlaff, violin. Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Hannu Lintu
    Ondine 1317-2
    Total Time:  60:42
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    When it comes to Bartok’s violin concerti, it is the second which tends to find more performances with nearly twice as many recordings of it currently available.  Most of the recordings of the second are recommendable and will be a matter of taste.  A more recent one from Hungaraton featuring Barnabas Kelemen and conducted by Zoltan Kocsis is a personal favorite at the top of the heap.  But it tends to boil down to what else is included on the album.  In this new release from Ondine, violinist Christian Tetzlaff has paired both concertos from concerts recorded in October 2017.

    Thirty years separate the two concertos which allow listeners to thus hear the stylistic changes at play in the world and within Bartok’s own expression.  The second concerto (1938) was composed for his friend Zoltan Szekely and is in a typical three-movement structure.  The piece eschews the more direct folk theme quotations instead integrating and transforming them into Bartok’s own musical gestures.  This can be heard from the first movement whose original “verbunkos” tempo marking suggested this general direction in his music.  A lyrical opening melody soon moves into a strikingly modern style with decidedly more angular writing and modern harmonic dress.  The intervals shift between those which are slightly more open and the collapse of these into dissonant clusters.  All of this against a consistently virtuosic solo line.  The drama allows for these often folk-like moments to stand out in their simple beauty amidst the harsher signposts.  The later violin glissando in this movement seems to practically cry out in anguish in Tetzlaff’s hands.  This sense of collapse can be felt as well in the central movement.  This theme and variations is not serial in a strict sense, but certainly alludes to this style.  The movement is a microcosm of this influence as well as folkish colors with romanticism and modernism vying for attention.  The final movement is itself a variation of the first creating this larger arching structure to the concerto.  The Finnish RSO is an apt accompanist with clear execution and highlights of some of the more acerbic moments that appear in the work.  Tetzlaff’s tone here is quite stunning.  There are moments in the second movement where one can sense this atonal flirtation in an almost Berg-like way.  Tetzlaff brings this out quite well.  But it is equally fascinating to hear how the different colors of Bartok’s music are brought out in often stunning detail.  Lintu helps punctuate this dramatic give and take against a soloist that sometimes plays down almost to a whisper in the central movement, which is filled with fantastic articulation from the orchestra as well.  The third movement opens with the clearly-delineated motif that connects us to the first movement.  Now it moves ever frenetically forward as the orchestra’s own energy grows against the soloist’s.  The detail here is also quite well done with the beauty of Bartok’s orchestration one of the delights brought out so well.  Another of the hallmarks of the performance is the way the different repeated gestures across the movements are performed in a way that recalls their earlier appearance and helps make the musical connections clearer.  The conclusion of the work may have you jumping to your feet.

    The first concerto, composed between 1907-08, was written as a romantic flirtation with the violinist Stefi Geyer who was seven years younger than the composer.  Each of the planned three movements was intended to reflect different aspects of her personality.  The first expressing the more interior and intimate aspects in warm lyricism and the second the more immediately seen outgoing ones through virtuosic displays.  A third movement never was completed and the concerto itself lay unperformed until 1956.  Bartok would reuse the material from the first movement in the first of the Two Portraits (1911).  The work is an extension of leitmotif ideas, particularly in a motif used in the first movement, and even has a bit of Richard Strauss in its fabric.  When the soloist enters, there is almost a sense of the line being self-absorbed, unable to see around itself.  The orchestra slowly sneaks in to try and connect their sense of this line with the soloist in intricate writing.  The tortuous romanticism gradually grows as the movement progresses.  The second movement incorporates a children’s song which is one of three themes used in this sonata-form structure.  Again, Tetzlaff’s articulation here helps drive this work with gorgeous phrasing that is equally matched in the orchestra.  Both here prove to be just as in synch interpretively as in the first work on the album and that helps make this an even more engaging performance.

    While I will not likely toss aside the Kelemen, the pairing here of the two concerti with such excellent sound and dramatic energy is going to be hard to beat moving forward.