Béla Bartók - Violin Concertos (Arabella Steinbacher)

Information

Composer: Béla Bartók

1. Violin Concerto No. 2, BB 117: I. Allegro non troppo
2. Violin Concerto No. 2, BB 117: II. Andante tranquillo
3. Violin Concerto No. 2, BB 117: III. Allegro molto
4. Violin Concerto No. 1, BB 48a: I. Andante sostenuto
5. Violin Concerto No. 1, BB 48a: II. Allegro giocoso

Arabella Steinbacher, violin
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Marek Janowski, conductor

Date: 2010
Label: Pentatone
http://www.pentatonemusic.com/bartok-violin-concertos-steinbacher-janowski

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Review

Arabella Steinbacher’s program of Béla Bartók’s two violin concertos begins with the second from 1938, and the violin’s entry makes it seem as though she will favor muscular strength over romantic lushness; whether or not the two qualities find a perfect balance in the work itself, performances themselves often tilt in one direction or another. Still, Marek Janowski and the orchestra create plenty of atmosphere in the first movement, in which soloist and orchestra juggle, respectively, feverish passagework and bracing orchestral outbursts. Anne-Sophie Mutter (who has supported Steinbacher’s career) and Gil Shaham both recorded the work for Deutsche Grammophon (Deutsche Grammophon 289 459 639-2, which I reviewed in Fanfare 22:6), and their performances, like Isaac Stern’s, perhaps shifted the balance point slightly in the direction of warm sonorousness from Ivry Gitlis’s “steelier, harder-driving modernity” with Harold Byrnes and the Concerts Colonne Orchestra from 1955, reissued from Vox PL 10760 and on The Strad 10. PentaTone’s detailed recorded sound places Steinbacher in a balance with orchestra more suggestive of partnership than spotlighted solo (in 1958, Columbia’s engineers set Stern front and center in his recording with Leonard Bernstein—now available on Sony SMK 64 502), but at times, as in the first movement’s coda and the thematic statement by the violin at the opening of the second movement, that balance may seem slightly recessive. In any case, the 1716 Booth Stradivari sounds mercurial in the upper registers, if taut in the lower ones.

However gritty Steinbacher may seem in the concerto’s opening, she waxes insinuating in the slow movement’s first two variations, and Janowski and the orchestra spread a magic cloak of sound under her. But neither the grinding double-stops of one of the central variations nor the fiercely declamatory opening of the finale sound so dryly aggressive as I considered Yehudi Menuhin’s recording with Doráti when I first heard it in the early 1960s, though I may have taken that impression more from Mercury’s recorded sound than from Menuhin. As a result of PentaTone’s careful engineering, the brasses bite impudently in the finale, while the woodwinds sound bright and the strings, warm.

In the posthumously published First Concerto, dedicated to Stefi Geyer (who stowed it away in a trunk, where it appeared after her death), the violin’s voice soars above the strings, drawing them together at climactic moments as it does in the chorale movement of Berg’s concerto. Again, PentaTone’s engineers place Steinbacher closer to the midst of the orchestra than to its front. Stern and David Oistrakh recorded this concerto, which looks less far into the future than would the later one, and Steinbacher endows its first movement with nostalgic poetry rather than Stern’s lush intensity—or Oistrakh’s dark mystery. In the second movement, however, she plays with a cat-like mixture of skittishness and sharp-clawed aggression that brings the movement closer, at least in spirit, to the finale of the later concerto, though it stretches harmonic boundaries less far than the work from 1938 would—some passages in double-stops might, in fact, be drawn from a concerto by Kodály or by a Hungarian counterpart of Sibelius or Nielsen.

With the many recordings of both works available, Steinbacher’s, with its strong-minded solo playing, insightful orchestral accompaniment, and detailed recorded sound, could—and should—still be a candidate for the collections of Bartók’s music or of 20th-century violin concertos.

-- Robert Maxham, FANFARE

More reviews:

BBC Music Magazine  PERFORMANCE: ***** / SOUND: *****
http://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/bart%C3%B3k-violin-concertos-nos-1-and-2

http://www.allmusic.com/album/bart%C3%B3k-the-2-violin-concertos-mw0002017673

http://www.amazon.com/Bartok-Violin-Concerto-No-Posth/dp/B003T68VZS

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Béla Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and an ethnomusicologist. Bartók is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology. Bartók's music reflects two trends that dramatically changed the sound of music in the 20th century: the breakdown of the diatonic system of harmony, and the revival of nationalism as a source for musical inspiration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Bart%C3%B3k

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Arabella Steinbacher (born 14 November 1981) is a German classical violinist. Steinbacher was mentored by Ana Chumachenco at the Munich College of Music, and also took part in master classes by Dorothy DeLay and Kurt Sassmannshaus. She won several important prizes and a grant from the Free State of Bavaria in 2001, then became a student of Anne-Sophie Mutter's Freundeskreis ("Circle of friends"). Since starting to record exclusively for Pentatone in 2009, she published a number of albums demonstrating her musical variety. She currently plays the Booth Stradivarius (1716) provided by the Nippon Music Foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabella_Steinbacher

http://www.arabella-steinbacher.com/vita.html

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