SIBELIUS: Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47; PROKOFIEV: Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 19 – Janine Jansen, violin/ Oslo Philharmonic/ Klaus Mäkelä – Decca 486 4748 (55:10) [Distr. by Universal] ****:
Dutch violin virtuoso Janine Jansen (b. 1978), in collaboration with conductor Klaus Mäkelä from Oslo, Norway, in June 2023, delivers two distinctly varied approaches to Northern musical expression. The Sibelius Concerto dates from 1905, in its revised state, an often tragic plaint of a composer’s lament for the violin-virtuoso career he felt he had forfeited. The 1915 First Concerto of Serge Prokofiev lyrically, even surrealistically, portrays a thwarted love affair with Nina Meshcherskaya. Violinist Joseph Szigeti, who first recorded the work, with Sir Thomas Beecham, remarked on the concerto’s “mixture of fairy-tale naiveté and daring savagery.”
Jansen and Mäkelä approach the opening Allegro moderato of the Sibelius Concerto with a biting intensity easily comparable to the best of the David Oistrakh renditions, Jansen’s affettuoso octaves in full lather. The orchestral tissue broils with a grim intensity, eagerly awaiting any pause in the solo line for a dramatic explosion of colorful passion. The Oslo woodwinds and low string prove especially communicative of fissive possibilities. The ardent, meditative cadenza that virtually serves as a development section for the movement bears a startling, mesmeric character, on a par with those performances by the late Johanna Martzy and Ginette Neveu. Sudden register shifts, double stops, and ricochet bowing pose no obstacles to Jansen’s articulate vocal line, even in harmonics. The dark, brooding, melancholy of the first movement maintains a deeply focused tension that bears repeated audition.
Clarinets, oboe, and brass emerge in concert with Jansen for the voluptuous second movement, Adagio di molto, which Jansen takes in a solemn, brooding fashion. Various passing dissonances intrude into the B-flat major procession, a kind of grueling subtext to an ardent high-toned song from Jansen, marked by broken octaves. The melodic line, beset by emotional paroxysms, searches for resolution, which the woodwinds attempt to provide in opposing scalar passages. The climax, on C and B-flat, retreats to an elongated meditation from Jansen and subdued horns, the whole afloat in a vaporous coda.
The famous finale, the “dance for polar bears,” Allegro, ma non tanto in D, ¾., whips and whistles in daring harmonic and rhythmic thrusts. The orchestral explosion on the pedal point elicits from Jansen a frenzied series of propulsions and bow shifts, all intended to heroic effect.
The applied harmonics create a ghostly parody of the main theme, now embroiled in swirling figures from winds, pulsating basses, and timpani. The last pages proffer an emotional maelstrom, a grinding collision of sixteenth notes and a solo line resolute in its ascent to a final D.
The 1923 Paris premiere of the Prokofiev D Major Concerto, by way of Marcel Darrieux and Serge Koussevitzky demanded the immediate attention of Joseph Szigeti, who took it heart as part of his touring repertory. The first movement Andantino casts the veil of a dream sequence, sognando, 6/8, with a counter theme in C major played as a kind of narrative. Jansen takes the tempo slightly more marcato than some of her famous colleagues, Milstein and the two Oistrakhs. The narrante section undergoes a series of variants, eventually becoming sardonic and savage, rather typical of Prokofiev’s early style. After a brief solo cadenza that ends in harmonics, the orchestra strings shimmer once more with the opening, dream material, flute, harp, and violin in ethereal tandem.
Unrelenting ostinatos mark the wild second movement, Scherzo: Vivacissimo, a veritable banshee whirlwind, with Jansen’s raucous violin in dervish paroxysms. A punishing march sets in, the accents biting and strident, underlined by a tambourine. The virtuoso effects are not confined to the solo, since the orchestra contributes to the malign grotesquerie. A laughing, mocking punctuation erupts from the winds, and even the harp gets its strokes in before the abrupt coda.
With the final movement, Moderato, Prokofiev makes use of cyclical form to round off his fascinating journey: the bassoon has initiated a martial pulse in eighth notes, the violin’s joining in. All proceed to the Allegro moderato, an intensification of the martial elements, but all subsides into that dreamy distillation from the first movement, the flute and harp again prominent in colors, with hazy, scalar passages insinuating their way into the phantasma, Jansen’s lyric high register sails into space with the flute at the coda. It has all been colorful and exciting, at once.
—Gary Lemco
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