Vilde Frang, Ning Feng, and Recording Engineers

I listened off-air to two violin concertos played by the younger generation of violinists: Ning Feng played the Sibelius (with the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Simone Young) and Vilde Frang played the Elgar, with the San Francisco symphony orchestra conducted by Krzysztof Urbanski. Both violinists gave totally admirable performances, with Frang getting a special mention for maintaining the tempos and not lingering in what is admittedly a somewhat over-long concerto (50 minutes). These performances by both young violinists are up there with the best.

What was not up with the best were the performances by the respective British and American recording engineers, particularly sad in the case of the BBC that used to have a great deal of expertise in this area. This new generation of Anglo-American engineers has been brought up on the terminology of popular or entertainment music, where the “star” is spotlit, whilst the “backing group” is relegated to the background. Adjust your volume to listen comfortably to Feng or Frang, and the orchestras recede to Studio B somewhere nearby. Adjust your volume to listen to the orchestras, and the violinists will knock you out of your socks. I find increasingly that to get a realistic balance, one needs to look to recording engineers in Germany, Holland or Scandiavia, where the tradition of Tonmeister appears to live on, and where recording engineers have actually experienced going to symphony concerts and listening to concertos where the soloist emerges from the orchestral sound, rather than dominates it. If anything, the BBC engineers here are worse, since they continually tweak the sound and balance during the performance, so occasionally you get a giant clarinet and a normal violin, then an enormous violin and a distant orchestral string section.

By coincidence, I followed this up with listening to the ever-talented Arabella Steinbacher playing Shostakovich's second violin concerto, where Shostakovich, Steinbacher, Nelsons (the conductor) and Orfeo (the Munich-based recording company) all illustrate just how to record a solo violin well integrated with the sound of a symphony orchestra. There: it can be done.