The music of Béla Bartók

Josef Haydn wrote 68 string quartets. Mozart wrote 23, Beethoven 16, Schubert around 20, and Shostakovich 15. I love string quartets and recalled having on my shelf for several decades a double CD album of the six string quartets by Béla Bartók, recorded in 1965 by the Novak Quartet. I took them down out of curiosity, blew off the dust, and settled down.

I have never taken to Bartok's music; I have always found it dessicated and lacking in soul. So it was now with the string quartets; I listened to two of them, then decided I was wasting my life and listening time. One would have thought Bartok would have learned from his extensive folk song collecting that, to appeal to listeners, music needed the occasional theme, motif, melody or tune. None of that here: the quartets meander down the river. There are no landmarks, no memorable sites, nothing to retain in the mind. The six quartets are firmly back on my shelves where my heirs will no doubt discover them sometime in the future. Mr Bartok's music is not for me.

Renaud Capuçon in Elgar

The premier of Edward Elgar's one and only violin concerto took place in 1910, with Elgar conducting Fritz Kreisler and the LSO. Despite its 1910 date, the work is firmly anchored in the 19^th century. Weighing in at around 50 minutes, it can often seem over-long, a feature of so many works at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th. But it contains much genial and affectionate music, and I've always had a soft spot for it.

I bought the new recording with Renaud Capuçon and the LSO, with Simon Rattle conducting, and I am mightily impressed. Capuçon's elegant and sophisticated playing turns out to suit the work like a glove. I've never been an admirer of Rattle, but here he ensures that the violin and orchestra conduct a true dialogue; here the concerto is really a concerto for violin and orchestra. And, to cap it all, the recording (Erato) is extremely fine, with an exemplary balance between orchestra and solo violin. I listened to the recording with my full attention engaged throughout. I've always been an admirer of Capuçon's violin playing, but here he rises to even greater heights in my estimation since he appears to be at one with Elgar's sentimental and long-breathing music. Three stars, and my grateful thanks to all concerned for bringing this concerto to life. In future, whenever I want to listen to Elgar's concerto, this is the first of my twenty-three recordings of the work I will turn to.

The current CD also contains a recording of the late sonata for violin and piano by Elgar, a melancholy work that I must have listened to many times, but rarely remember having done so. Renaud Capuçon is joined by Stephen Hough, and the performance would seem to me to be the best since 1918. All praise to the recording engineers. Balancing a violin and piano for a recording would appear to be difficult; either the violin is recorded too close, with a distant piano, or more often a giant piano too close with a violin almost inaudible when playing pianissimo. Not here. Violin and piano are recorded as equals. The playing is also wonderful, with both musicians entering into the spirit of Elgar's work. I am running out of stars.

Francesca Dego and Paganini's Il Cannone

I bought a recent CD on which Francesca Dego plays an assortment of pieces mainly to hear Paganini's 1743 Guarneri del Gesù “Il Cannone” in action. The violin sounds splendid, as does the playing of the highly talented Ms Dego. Italians somewhat dominated the early 18^th century violin scene, with the Cremona makers, and violinists and composers such as Corelli, Vivaldi, Locatelli et al. The cauldron of eminent violinists later shifted to Central and Eastern Europe -- and is also now strong in China, Korea and Japan. There have been few eminent Italian violinists of late (and even fewer Spanish, for some reason). So I greatly welcome Ms Dego's arrival on the scene.

She plays here a jumble of different music, most of it connected in some vague way with Paganini, though Kreisler's Recitative & Scherzo does not really fit the Paganini mould. Paganini's La Campanella arranged by Kreisler for violin and piano is well played. John Corigliano's Red Violin Caprices is more interesting than I originally feared. Carlo Boccadoro's Come d'autumno did not make an impression on me, and I actively disliked his reworking of the piano accompaniment to Paganini's Cantabile Op 17, a work that should celebrate the cantabile powers of a good violin without the distraction of twirls and thumpings from a piano that strives to rival the violin for interest. Rossini's Una parola a Paganini proved a bit pale and lacking anything of interest.

I didn't dislike Alfred Schnittke's A Paganini as much as I feared I was going to. It is well written for the violin. Karol Szymanowski's reworking of Paganini's caprices 20, 21 and 24 has never appealed to me. When writing for the violin, Paganini knew what he was doing, and Szymanowski's attempt to make the caprices into duo music for violin and piano is somewhat doomed. All those — including Robert Schumann, who should have known better — who attempted to “improve” Paganini's caprices with a piano thumping away, are doomed to failure.

So a CD with interesting bits from time to time. Hardly a great success; there are hundreds of metric tonnes of music of shorter pieces for solo violin, or violin and piano, and Francesca Dego could have made some more interesting choices with music from the 18^th and 19^th centuries.