Khachaturian's Violin Concerto, and Antje Weithaas (again)

My taste in music centres on the 18^th and 19^th centuries, plus the first couple of decades of the 20^th. I have little interest in most of the music of the past 100 years (with significant exceptions, such as that of Prokofiev and Shostakovich). Around the middle of the past century, however, appeared four violin concertos that appeal to me greatly: the concerto by Benjamin Britten with a very English flavour, the concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold with a very Viennese flavour, the first violin concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich with a very Russian flavour – and the violin concerto by Aram Khachaturian with a very Armenian flavour.

I have been listening to a recording of the Khachaturian concerto played by the German violinist, Antje Weithaas. It is difficult to decide what to admire most about Weithaas's performance: her extraordinary sense of rhythm, her consummate technical expertise, or her exemplary ability to adapt to a music written in a very different idiom. She joins Julian Sitkovetsky (with Niyazi) and Leonid Kogan (with Monteux) on the podium for this concerto, thanks also to excellent and idiomatic support from the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie conducted by Daniel Raiskin. Highly recommended listening to counteract the morbid world of Covid-19.