Saturday 16 April 2011

Patricia Kopatchinskaja is a highly interesting violinist. A recent recording by her (with Philippe Herreweghe and the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées) is almost the first time I have enjoyed Beethoven's two Romances Op 40 and 50. Kopatchinskaja plays them simply and at a flowing tempo. Her Beethoven violin concerto on the disc is also excellent, and a version I enjoyed greatly. No lingering, no posturing, just excellent playing (with excellent support from Herreweghe). A big disadvantage, however, is the cadenza; Kopachinskaja chooses to play around with the cadenza Beethoven wrote for the piano, complete with dubbing of an extra track of violin runs (to emulate the piano version) and more drums than in an African village. Liza Ferschtman played around with the same unsatisfactory cadenza in her recording of the concerto; given the number of excellent cadenzas written for this concerto, why do these young women have to mess around with a thoroughly unidiomatic piano cadenza? And it's a great shame these experimental cadenzas are not give a separate track so that, if necessary, one could just skip them (or remake the disc with a cadenza interpolated from the excellent selection on a Ricci disc). We can, of course, just skip to the second movement of the concerto once the cadenza starts, but then we would miss Kopatchinskaja's delicate, hushed reprise after the cadenza.

The recording claims to feature "period instruments", whatever that means. Kopatchinskaja plays on a violin from 1834, which is the wrong period for a concerto written in 1806. But, happily, she is not a "baroque" violinist, so we are spared the dry, colourless sound so typical of the baroque brigade.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Harry,concerning period instruments: The maker of atricvias violin is G.F.Pressenda (1777-1854). He was trained at the beginning of the 19. century and built violins in his own shop from 1821 (a slightly modified Stradivarius model). Violins from his hand start at 1819. I think one can still count the Beethoven concerto and Pressendas violins as belonging to about the same period, namely the first half of the 19. century. All the best L.F.

Harry Collier said...

Interesting comment. Many thanks.