BEETHOVEN & BRITTEN: Violin Concertos – Janine Jansen, violin/ The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and the London Symphony Orchestra/ Paavo Järvi – Decca 001328102, 73:21 ***** [Release date: Sept. 29, 09]:
From her first recording, Decca have surrounded the Dutch virtuoso Janine Jansen with its best production and highest musical values. The result has been classical music of exceptional calibre, like a high-level cerebral love affair.
Jansen and Decca have surpassed themselves with their new recordings of the Beethoven and Britten concertos. They confirm that digital technology has the potential to rival the best analogue recordings of 50 years ago.
Jansen’s bright silverly Beethoven is a miracle of fluency and passion; she fearlessly puts her stunning virtuosity totally at the service of an interpretation which mounts the music’s splendid architecture with undisguised physical exhilaration. She plays Fritz Kreisler’s first-movement cadenza like an eagle soaring high. In the third movement Jansen unfurls Beethoven’s Italianate writing to produce something breathtakingly new and original, almost ending with a brief and curious emotional surprise before the final triumphal notes. One other thing: her sexy trilling starts off uncertain at first, then skips a beat, then races away with the bit between its teeth.
Peter Pirie wrote about the music Britten was writing in 1939: "It was brilliant, beautifully constructed, with a high, clear coloring and a kind of brittle gaiety. Now and then a touch of magic floated over the surface, a beauty wistful and elusive."
And Jansen is no less miraculous in the Britten. Somehow she manages to overcome the music’s fiendish technical difficulties while still managing to capture and extract the unique fragility and incandescent beauty of a work that few still have the courage to dare.
Conductor Järvi and the two orchestras are Jansen’s perfect foil and partner; they phrase together seamlessly, they pause before an apogee, not after. Hitting their fortes with impact and power, the orchestra provides a dark cherry sound and texture that complements her steel. (Great solo bassoon playing in the Beethoven, by the way.)
I auditioned this new CD first on a magnificent Mark Levinson sound system in a Lexus GS450 Hybrid I road-tested between here and Portland a few weeks ago. The quality of the sound and the powerful simplicity of the 330-watt audio system, with its discreet 7.1 surround sound, matched Beethoven, Britten and Jansen at every bar. Then, while in Portland, I had an opportunity to hear the disc on a Spendor/Naim system and it sounded even more glorious, with a stability in the spatial relationship between the soloist and orchestra that I have rarely heard before.
– Laurence Vittes
