![]() I find myself at odds now with musicologist Robert Philip’s assessment that for a performance to work, “The rhapsodic passages of the first movement need careful control if the pieces is to hold together as a coherent whole,” but counterintuitively “The second and third movements, by contrast, can scarcely fail if played strongly and competently.” Counterintuitive because it’s the pyrotechnics of the first and third movement that can rescue a subpar performance, while there’s nowhere to hide mistakes in the sombre and clairvoyant spotlight of the slow movement (altogether I’ve become just a bit more suspicious of Philip’s judgement after realizing that, despite the invaluable resource of his Classical Music Lover’s Companion, the 1000-page tome passes without the mention of a single female composer or composer of colour…hmm). I don’t think there’s a more rapturous passage in this whole collection the rest of the movement is but convalescence from the tremendous heights of this cadenza cliff. The figure pushes higher and higher in octaves, beyond the intuitive punctuations of typical phrasing to suspend a precipitating single note above the mass of the orchestra’s accompaniment. This time around I think I’ve found a new apex of the concerto for me: the soloist’s devilish trill that crisps the very tip of the impossibly long figure at the bottom of the slow movement. ![]() Listening to it this week, in comparison to last year for example, it’s the slow movement that really sticks-despite being the least interesting part of the last time I heard it performed live with the TSO (also check out my interview with the soloist for that occasion, Jonathan Crow). At first it was the craggy figurations of the final movement that kept me coming back, then as the catalogue of violin concertos that I was similarly enamoured by grew, the unique wintry glow of this immense yet compact one-off shown all the more. My relationship with this concerto grew organically over the last five years, even before I was particularly gung ho for the genre. The month-long affair with one of my favourite composers, Sibelius, ends this week with his Violin Concerto.
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