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.