Search - Alban Berg, Benjamin Britten, Paul Watkins :: Berg, Britten: Violin Concertos

Solid Performances of Two 20th Century Violin Concerto Maste

Grady Harp | Los Angeles, CA United States | 11/16/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Why Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto, Opus 15 is not a staple of the orchestra repertoires around the world remains a mystery. It is seldom performed, is rich in inventive writing, contains passages of striking virtuosity for the performer, and contains some of Britten's most beautiful melodic lines. It may take an evening with a live performance (as recently with the Los Angeles Philharmonic , Midori as soloist) to stimulate classical music lovers to reconsider the excellence of this work, or it may take hearing a performance on recording as overwhelmingly beautiful as this coupling of the Britten with the better known and more often performed Alban Berg by the young Daniel Hope to lift the work to the public conscience. Whatever reason brings the listener back to this rather early work by Benjamin Britten is rewarded with an appreciation with just how extraordinary is this concerto.



Daniel Hope is an artist's artist, placing the composer's intentions first and 'showmanship' last. His reading of both the Berg and Britten are played with a clarity of tone and phrasing that allows him to move from the technically 'impossible' passages into the lyrical ones with complete ease. Of note is the manner in which Hope is in conversation with the orchestra (here the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Watkins) during the Part II Adagio of the Berg where the orchestra is in Bach like chorale while the ornamentation is from the precise writing for the violin. Or both the opening and closing passages of the Britten when the silences and sustained lines are of paramount importance.



Others may hail the impressive Vengerov recording (coupling the Britten with the Walton Viola concerto) as more exciting, but for this listener the intimacy Daniel Hope achieves here is overwhelmingly beautiful. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, November 08"

Both works receive incomparable performances

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 01/10/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I don't think this 2003 recording from Daniel Hope was much noticed on our side of the Atlantic. The catalog is full of notable versions of the Berg Violin Concerto, and the Britten is almost never played here. But in all respects this is an ear-opening experience. Hope and the cellist-turned-conductor Paul Watkins are protoges of the great Yehudi Menuhin, and they have picked up his enormous integrity and spiritual directness.



However they inherited their style, here is a perfect amalgam of conductor and soloist. They have set out to clarify the complexities of the Berg by merging violin and orchestra into a single vloice (the miking reflects this by not forcing Hope into the spotlight), and for the first time I found it possible to follow Berg's imagination from beginning to end. Not that the erading feels studied or academic. Hope, born in 1974, belongs to a generation of musicians for whom the work's thorny idiom comes as naturally as Bach. Compared to his free, flexible, lucid, reading, those from Stern, Perlman, and Mutter seem stilted and even confused.



Hope brings similar revelations to the Britten, which he plays -- as he does the Berg -- much more inwardly than expected. Nothing is done for show, and yet every measure is totally involving. Britten wrote in harmonies that are modernist but more conventional than Berg's -- his violin concerto followed Berg's by three years. On hearing the world premiere in Barcelona in 1936, the young Britten described the Berg as "shattering" and "sublime." Without imitating it, Britten wrote a work that can be just as mysterious and almost as devastating. The two are linked by their unnerving, grief-tinged, at times harrowing reaction to the Nazi era.



Berg was specifically motivated by the tragic death of an 18-year-old girl, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius: the concerto's two parts depict her in life and then in death, leading to an angelic transfiguration. Britten more generally captures the haunted atmosphere of a darkened Europe in the late Thirties. Both composers place disjointed styles cheek to jowl. In the Berg we get a Viennese waltz, Austrian landler, and variations on a Bach funeral chorale, "Es ist genug" (echoing Jesus's "It is finished" on the cross). Britten's juxtapositions are more puzzling -- there are quasi-tango rhythms in the first movement, Mahlerian drum taps, and a wide array of desperate outcries in the Passacaglia-form finale.



In short, this isn't an easy listen, and I don't want to fall into the trap of recommending it to sound superior, as if one deserves a prize for getting through thick underbrush. The listening here is truly enjoyable and deeply emotional. Hope, like Menuuhin, has the rare, selfless ability to get to the very heart of music, as if he sees past the notes to the composer's most heartfelt mtivations. He made me feel that both these works really matter -- what more can one ask?"

Find out why the fuss over Berg's atonal violin concerto

Frank T. Manheim | Fairfax VA | 04/09/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is the recording for the music lover who doesn't like atonal music, but wants to know what the fuss over Berg's violin concerto is all about. Alban Berg (1885-1935) has historically been the most played and popular composer of the 12-tone school of composition founded by Arnold Schoenberg. He wrote his violin concerto in memory of Manon Gropius, the beloved daughter of Alma Mahler (wife of Gustav Mahler) and Walter Gropius, a pioneering architect. Manon died at 18 of infantile paralysis and Berg did not live to hear his concerto, which besides his operas, Lulu, and Wozzeck, is probably the best known 12-tone "serial" composition - and maybe the least typical. Quoting from Daniel Hope's liner notes: "It's good for an audience to hear a piece the way the composer wrote it. They won't understand all the codes, or every intricacy of his 12-note system, but they'll get a lot, and that will enrich their appreciation. When I play the piece, I have all the codes marked in yellow. I first heard it when I was 14, and it blew my mind." Hope's candid, no-nonesense approach permeates his empathetic performance. Throughout this concerto I heard an emotionally aroused composer creating sensitive and finely-wrought sound painting. In nonprofessional music lovers like me Berg's writing in this work can imply tonality and resolution - even if his construction specifically excludes it. This may help explain how a 1935 Berg obituary writer, Willem Pijper, could refer to Schoenberg's development of 12 tone music as "destructive to European music", but still call Berg a great composer."