Viktoria Mullova / Misha Mullov-Abbado MUSIC WE LOVE

MUSIC WE LOVE

 

Viktoria Mullova / Paavo Järvi ARVO PÄRT

Immutable, austere, impassable – the strength of Arvo Pärt’s music lies in its ability to project an image as powerful and complete as the religious iconography it often seeks to replicate.

This is not music that hinges on sudden shifts and sharp contrasts. However, at its core lies the age-old dichotomy between freedom and control, head and heart – or ‘mathematics … and love’, as Pärt himself put it in last month’s Gramophone feature on this recording. Keeping both elements in check – and in balance with one another – remains key.

The Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova brilliantly manages to tease out these dichotomies on this new recording of Pärt’s works for violin and orchestra. In Fratres, she approaches each variation from a different angle. Sap and rosin fly off the bow in the coruscating arpeggio figurations of the opening chord sequence. Mullova’s skill here is to ratchet up the intensity by gradually imparting weight and purpose to the lowest note in each pattern. Lighter feather-bedding is applied in the fourth variation’s rapid triadic ostinatos, creating an almost symphonic effect. Intensity is maintained throughout the double-stopped variation but the expression never becomes exaggerated. There is no let up – and very little rubato – until Mullova finally eases off during the final ‘flautando’ variation.

Mullova’s instinct is to know when and where to foreground these shifting dichotomies. They gradually dissipate during the two-movement Tabula rasa and dissolve completely by the time we get to Spiegel im Spiegel. Aided in Tabula rasa by the equally impressive Florian Donderer on second violin, the overall shape of the work hinges on maintaining a more or less exact proportional relationship of 1:2 between both movements. Gidon Kremer’s premiere recording of the work (ECM), still a benchmark in many respects, is close at 9'36" and 16'50" respectively. But, at 10'57" and 20'35", Mullova is pretty much bang-on.

Pärt was said to have been very pleased with the way the recording sessions went with Mullova, Paavo Järvi and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, and one can certainly understand why. Get the mathematics right and the love will take care of itself. (Pwyll ap Siôn / Gramophone)

Viktoria Mullova PROKOFIEV

Viktoria Mullova's ONYX album is an all Prokofiev affair recorded live, with the lyrical 2nd violin concerto joined with the solo violin sonata and the sonata for two violins. Robert Soetens premiered the Duo Sonata in Paris in December 1932, partnered by Samuel Dushkin, for whom Stravinsky had recently composed a Violin Concerto. Knowing of Prokofiev's rivalry with Stravinsky, Soetens persuaded Prokofiev to write him a concerto. Composed in 1935 just before Prokofiev resettled in Soviet Russia, the Second Violin Concerto includes in its central movement one of his most celebrated long-arching melodies. The Solo Sonata was an official commission towards the end of Prokofiev's life. Originally intended for an ensemble of talented child violinists, Prokofiev so wrote the work that it could equally be played by a soloist. Paavo Jarvi and Viktoria Mullova have been close musical collaborators for many years. (Arkiv Music)

Viktoria Mullova / Giuliano Carmignola VIVALDI Concertos for two violins

Thanks to The Four Seasons, the solo violin concerto is the genre with which Vivaldi is associated above all others. And indeed, at nearly 250 works, this species of composition forms the largest single portion of his output, outnumbering his next favourite, the concerto for orchestra, by more than four to one. In historical terms, too, his development of the formal aspects of the solo concerto was his greatest legacy: his model of three movements in the sequence fast-slow-fast still wields influence today, and the so-called "ritornello" structural principle - in which returning orchestral statements of a strongly defined, harmonically stable main theme offer a framework for more free-ranging and lightly scored passages involving the soloist - informed every composer's approach to concerto-writing until well into the 19th century.
Yet Vivaldi's concerto output is considerably more varied than that. Not only did he compose concertos for a wide range of string, wind and brass instruments, he also wrote them for differing numbers of soloists, from none to 13. His first taste of international fame, indeed, came with a set of twelve concertos which offered alongside its four solo concertos equal numbers of concertos for four and two violins. Published in Amsterdam in 1711 under the title L'estro armonico, it achieved great popularity in northern Europe in those early days of the instrumental concerto, making its mark on German composers in particular. The flautist and theorist Johann Joachim Quantz later recalled that "as musical pieces of a kind that was then entirely new, they made no small impression on me. I was eager to accumulate a good number of them, and Vivaldi's splendid ritornelli served as good models for me in later days". Vivaldi also acquired a keen following at the Dresden court, who sent their best violinist Johann Georg Pisendel to Venice to study with him; and in Weimar the young J.S. Bach transcribed for solo keyboard six pieces from the 1711 set, including two of the "double concertos".
Only two further concertos for two violins by Vivaldi were published in his lifetime (one as part of his op. 9 La cetra set in 1727, another printed independently in Amsterdam), but there are a further 24 surviving, most of them in the huge manuscript collection of Vivaldi's works now held in the National Library in Turin. These concertos are rarely performed today, either in concert or on record, but, like much of Vivaldi's unpublished output, contain music that is not only undeserving of its neglect, but offer facets of his creative personality that are not always evident in the works he chose to see into print.
The concertos presented on this disc by Viktoria Mullova and Giuliano Carmignola demonstrate for the most part Vivaldi's usual method of writing for two soloists on similar instruments: rapid interchanges of phrases and melodic fragments which echo, overlap and swap over with each other, alternating with passages of parallel motion, almost invariably euphonious (only the slow movement of RV 523 uses the texture to create expressive dissonances). They thus differ from the Vivaldi-inspired but more polyphonic manner of Bach's well-known Concerto for Two Violins, and show the influence of the dominant texture of the chamber music of the time, the trio sonata, in which two matched instruments would duet over a continuo accompaniment consisting of a bass-line instrument and a chord-playing lute, harpsichord or organ. This similarity appears even more obvious in the slow middle movements of RV 509, 516, 523 and 524, which feature "continuo" instead of orchestral accompaniment, and becomes explicit when it is seen that RV 516 shares both its second movement (with slight differences) and much of the material of its first and third with one of Vivaldi's unpublished trio sonatas (RV 71).
Whether these dialogues be virtuosic (as in the outer movements of RV 511 and 514) or melodious (as in the relaxed first movement of RV 509 or the expressive second movement of RV 514), they almost always give meticulously equal treatment to the two soloists, with neither assuming a dominant role in terms of range, technical difficulty or quantity of material. The effect is of a single character in the solo role, albeit one performing musical feats more complex than those achievable by a single player. In this regard it is easy to imagine them providing performance material for the youthful musicians of the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian orphanage of whose renowned all-female orchestra Vivaldi had charge as teacher and director for much of his career. Their concerts drew visitors in numbers to the Ospedale's chapel on the Riva degli Schiavoni - to admire the music of course, but also sometimes to search for wives; opportunities to show off the abilities of talented players in solo roles in as democratic a manner as possible must have been welcome. This primarily local use is suggested by the fact that while all of the concertos recorded here can be found in the Turin manuscript, thought to represent Vivaldi's own personal stock of scores, only RV 523 survives in a second contemporary copy.
Occasionally, however, there are breakaways from this two-as-one approach, when one violin will play a snatch of melody while the other accompanies. Such moments are fleeting, but can be all the more striking for that, as in the final movements of RV 524 and, most memorably, RV 516, where a glorious tune emerges from the arrow-like orchestral scales of the ritornelli. Having already pictured a pair of Ospedale inmates sharing the more equal dialogues elsewhere, is it going too far for us to speculate that Vivaldi himself, known as a virtuosic if sometimes unpolished violinist, might have taken one or other of these roles, either advertising his presence as melodic lead or gently supporting a favoured pupil with rock-solid arpeggios?  (Lindsay Kemp)

Viktoria Mullova / Claudio Abbado / Berliner Philharmoniker BRAHMS Violin Concerto

A CD offering less than 40 minutes of music these days is very short measure, but Mullova's is a commanding performance, pure and true throughout, made the more compelling by the spontaneous expressiveness that goes with a live performance. Her admirers need not hesitate, for with one minor reservation the recording is first-rate, and Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic here match the Brahmsian achievement of their DG symphony cycle.
The surprise is that the recording, made at a concert in Japan in January 1992, has taken so long to arrive. Maybe they were waiting for a coupling, but in any case this is a one-off recording, supervised not by Philips's own engineers but by those at NHK, Japan. The reservation I mentioned is that though the sound in generally warm, well-balanced and well-detailed with a pleasant hall-atmosphere, the prominent placing of the timpani means that the many tremolos in the outer movements, notable at first, tend to cloud the texture. The effect is distracting enough to bring home afresh just how many such tremolos there are. Happily, the audience is extremely quiet, except in the brief gap between slow movement and finale.
The first obvious comparison is with Itzhak Perlman's live Berlin recording for EMI with Barenboim conducting this same orchestra. That was made two months after the present one but in the Schauspielhaus, Berlin with a sound-balance typical of Perlman's recordings, with the solo violin in close-up set against full-bodied orchestral sound. The immediate impact of the bravura double-stopping passages is obviously greater, but Mullova consistently compensates in the extra dynamic range that she can convey, with the many reflective passages in the first movement as well as the central Adagio given a rapt intensity. The combination of purity and warmth go with a clear purposefulness, heightened by the degree of freedom Mullova allows herself in linking the different sections of each movement. Similarly, instead of storming through the thorny technical problems of the Joachim cadenza (curiously not identified in the booklet), she again allows herself a degree of elbow-room, giving it more than usual the feeling of a spontaneous improvisation, culminating in an exceptionally sweet and pure account of the coda, bringing the most inward meditation of all.
The violin entry in the Adagio is then open and songful, with full meditative intensity reserved for later in the movement. The clarity of Mullova's articulation in the finale is phenomenal, the bravura most compelling. . . . Mullova's new disc makes an excellent recommendation . . . . (Edward Greenfield, Gramophone)

Viktoria Mullova - Ottavio Dantone BACH Concertos

From the end of the 16th century, musicians and theoreticians perfected a system of codes for expression and composition that contributed to the spread of a shared language. It was common practice to adapt musical scores to the players and instruments available on any given occasion.

Bach’s music lends itself particularly well to such adaptation: his works are so structurally and conceptually perfect that they transcend sound and timbre. Many can be played on any instrument without altering their intrinsic value. Bach was famously wont to reuse his own music in different instrumental or indeed vocal combinations.

Viktoria and I agreed that it would be interesting to focus on the practice of transcription, accompanying two original concertos, BWV 1041 and BWV 1042, with two newly transcribed compositions. We opted for the Concerto BWV 1053, written for harpsichord in E major, but reused by Bach himself in two cantatas, and probably originally intended for oboe d’amore. I immediately thought of transcribing it in D major, not only because the brighter key suits the violin, but also because its astounding central Siciliano features a glorious melody that suits the violin perfectly.

Viktoria and I, having often performed the sonatas for violin and harpsichord, were keen to find a piece we could play with orchestra. One concerto is particularly well suited to this idea, BWV 1060. The original version is for two harpsichords and strings, though Bach first drafted it for two violins, or for violin and oboe. I feel this unprecedented version works very well, enriching the composition with a range of new nuances.

Key here is not only the reality of performance, but also the underlying aesthetic concept: rigour of form and musical language, together with inventive brilliance in performance, were features of the 18th century. Once we understand exactly how and why these expressive forms came about and interacted, the entire period comes magically to life. (Ottavio Dantone)