Search - Camille Saint-Saens, Henryk Wieniawski :: Saint-Saëns: Violin Concerto No. 3; Wieniawski: Violin Concerto No. 2 [Australia]

TRY HARDER

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 07/17/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is 4-star music, the Wienawski being distinctly the better and more characterful of the two compositions. It's perfectly possible to give 5-star performances of even 3-star or 2-star music as every enthusiast for Beecham knows, but it needs more than just perfect technique and perfect taste and musicianship. Perlman often strikes me as being a kind of Pollini of the violin - nothing he does ever upsets me, but the divine spark that I find so often in Heifetz or Stern or Ricci is something that I find less often in his work. A generation ago we were not in any position to be critical about such music-making as this, but I still feel I must contain my instinctive benevolence for the sake of consistency and deny this disc, reluctantly, a 5th star.



The Saint-Saens concerto is in the same key as Elgar's and carries the same opus number, a coincidence that evoked from Tovey some comparisons of the most patronising and tasteless insolence. In particular the very passage that provoked this lapse from him, the sequence in harmonics near the end of the slow movement, seems to me not to call for such comment in any way. It is original and it is beautiful, and I could hardly imagine it better handled than it is handled here by Perlman. The slow movement in general seems to me the best, but to compare this concerto, whatever its key or opus-order, with Elgar's great work which in my own estimation ranks second only to Brahms's and ahead of Beethoven's, is a thing not to be doing. The Wienawski seems to me to have far more fizz about it generally, and to provoke more involvement out of the soloist. The orchestral contribution is fine but once again lacking what I would echo Serkin in calling `personality'. I admire Barenboim enormously for his outstanding efforts in using his musical talent to promote Israeli/Palestinian understanding, but to put the matter at its simplest he has never struck me as being in the top flight either as pianist or as conductor.



The recorded quality is unexceptionable, the liner-note just about does its job, the value for money is reasonable, the quality of the work is exemplary in its way and the music is music I would not have wanted to be missing from my collection any longer. Enthusiasts for violin concertos of this school may be interested in the disc of the Coleridge-Taylor and Somervell works, composed later but belonging firmly in the cultural era of the two presented here, played like an angel by Anthony Marwood. There's more to this kind of thing than just consummate mastery, Mr Perlman."