The fiery violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has her own label, and she christens it with her first inscription of the Tchaikovsky Concerto, recorded live at Boettcher Concert Hall Denver, November 2004. The enterprise took place, incidentally, as an outgrowth of Nadja’s relationship to the novel work on this CD, the Concerto in D by Clarice Assad, a graduate of the Chicago School of Performing Arts in composition, the niece of the guitarist Odair and daughter of guitarist Sergio Assad. The Concerto is an outgrowth of her need to compose a Master Thesis piece, combined with sketches for a prelude and fugue and one song, “Ondas” (Waves), which Assad and Nadja agreed would serve as the second movement of the concerto. The Tchaikovsky proves rife with the qualities we expect from Nadja: intense concentration; the digging, rasping tone; the lingering over sentimental phrases with occasional glissandi and portamento; the exact intonation; the severe tension and high bravura approach. Nadja plays the last movement briskly, but she does not take the repeats a la Joshua Bell. Still, the audience gets fired up, even bursting into applause after the first movement.
The Assad Concerto opens much like Prokofiev’s D Major, with a quiet string pedal, then a long riff by the solo over muted horns and strings, with oboe, flute, and horn entry. The melodic tissue evolves, then it breaks off for a textural change to the Orient, tambourines and battery in lyrical flourish. The sonorities are not too far from those of Alan Hovhaness. The exoticism waxes lyrical, the violin in dialogue with woodwinds. The violin has a mid-movement, brief, modal cadenza, which also serves as a kind of theme-and-variations. Tender interchanges with the orchestra ensue, with Nadja high on the E string, then a darker, more aggressive surge from the orchestra which moves us to the abbreviated coda. The second movement song, Andante Espressivo, has some interesting touches, like Nadja’s playing over a tympani pedal. Pizzicato undergirding for her cantilena might suggest Prokofiev’s G Minor Concerto. Flute and clarinet take up some colors. The song becomes increasingly bucolic and dreamy. The writing makes me want to hear Nadja in the Barber Concerto. The Con Fuoco movement attempts a Persian dance, but aside from its rapid passages for violin, it lacks the inspiration Prokofiev revealed in the Second Concerto. Assad does better in the lyrical moments, despite her efforts to make complicated metrics. Orientalisms abound in the flute writing, little curlicues of color, while Nadja breezes along on fiery sixteenth notes. A horn entry, the flute, pulsating strings, and we are into the dervish-like coda, ending with an upward scale, not too far from Sibelius. So, we have a somewhat derivative piece whose melodic elements reveal a talent perhaps more suited to small forms. Still, mighty efforts all around, and everybody seems to have had plenty of fun.
–Gary Lemco
