Berg & Britten: Violin Concertos

Why Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto, Opus 15 is not a staple of the orchestra repertoires around the world remains a mystery. It is seldom performed, is rich in inventive writing, contains passages of striking virtuosity for the performer, and contains some of Britten's most beautiful melodic lines. It may take an evening with a live performance (as recently with the Los Angeles Philharmonic , Midori as soloist) to stimulate classical music lovers to reconsider the excellence of this work, or it may take hearing a performance on recording as overwhelmingly beautiful as this coupling of the Britten with the better known and more often performed Alban Berg by the young Daniel Hope to lift the work to the public conscience. Whatever reason brings the listener back to this rather early work by Benjamin Britten is rewarded with an appreciation with just how extraordinary is this concerto.

Daniel Hope is an artist's artist, placing the composer's intentions first and 'showmanship' last. His reading of both the Berg and Britten are played with a clarity of tone and phrasing that allows him to move from the technically 'impossible' passages into the lyrical ones with complete ease. Of note is the manner in which Hope is in conversation with the orchestra (here the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Watkins) during the Part II Adagio of the Berg where the orchestra is in Bach like chorale while the ornamentation is from the precise writing for the violin. Or both the opening and closing passages of the Britten when the silences and sustained lines are of paramount importance.

Others may hail the impressive Vengerov recording (coupling the Britten with the Walton Viola concerto) as more exciting, but for this listener the intimacy Daniel Hope achieves here is overwhelmingly beautiful. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, November 08

I don't think this 2003 recording from Daniel Hope was much noticed on our side of the Atlantic. The catalog is full of notable versions of the Berg Violin Concerto, and the Britten is almost never played here. But in all respects this is an ear-opening experience. Hope and the cellist-turned-conductor Paul Watkins are protoges of the great Yehudi Menuhin, and they have picked up his enormous integrity and spiritual directness.

However they inherited their style, here is a perfect amalgam of conductor and soloist. They have set out to clarify the complexities of the Berg by merging violin and orchestra into a single vloice (the miking reflects this by not forcing Hope into the spotlight), and for the first time I found it possible to follow Berg's imagination from beginning to end. Not that the erading feels studied or academic. Hope, born in 1974, belongs to a generation of musicians for whom the work's thorny idiom comes as naturally as Bach. Compared to his free, flexible, lucid, reading, those from Stern, Perlman, and Mutter seem stilted and even confused.

Hope brings similar revelations to the Britten, which he plays -- as he does the Berg -- much more inwardly than expected. Nothing is done for show, and yet every measure is totally involving. Britten wrote in harmonies that are modernist but more conventional than Berg's -- his violin concerto followed Berg's by three years. On hearing the world premiere in Barcelona in 1936, the young Britten described the Berg as "shattering" and "sublime." Without imitating it, Britten wrote a work that can be just as mysterious and almost as devastating. The two are linked by their unnerving, grief-tinged, at times harrowing reaction to the Nazi era.

Berg was specifically motivated by the tragic death of an 18-year-old girl, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius: the concerto's two parts depict her in life and then in death, leading to an angelic transfiguration. Britten more generally captures the haunted atmosphere of a darkened Europe in the late Thirties. Both composers place disjointed styles cheek to jowl. In the Berg we get a Viennese waltz, Austrian landler, and variations on a Bach funeral chorale, "Es ist genug" (echoing Jesus's "It is finished" on the cross). Britten's juxtapositions are more puzzling -- there are quasi-tango rhythms in the first movement, Mahlerian drum taps, and a wide array of desperate outcries in the Passacaglia-form finale.

In short, this isn't an easy listen, and I don't want to fall into the trap of recommending it to sound superior, as if one deserves a prize for getting through thick underbrush. The listening here is truly enjoyable and deeply emotional. Hope, like Menuuhin, has the rare, selfless ability to get to the very heart of music, as if he sees past the notes to the composer's most heartfelt motivations. He made me feel that both these works really matter -- what more can one ask?

P.S. 2013 - In an interview about this concerto, Gil shaham connects it to the Spanish Civil War, with the opening rhythm an approaching march, the plaintive violin in the finale a woman screaming, and overall the structure one of disintegration.

I already have a recording of the Berg, so I didn't download it. I had never heard Britten's Violin Concerto until I purchased this version by Hope, Watkins and the BBC Symphony. I've heard the BBC Symhony under Slatkin and Wigglesworth, and here, once again, they prove themselves worthy.

Britten's harmonies and musical ideas can be subtle, even muted at times, so it is important not to forget to emphasize when emphasis is necessary. As it is played on this recording, his Violin Concerto can obviously stand with the greatest of the twentieth century, along with Bartók's Second. All the way from Britten's opening, inviting-but-eerily-strange chords, to the sonorous, bass-driven swirling climb in thirds near the end of the final movement, the orchestra is dramatically centered, never dull or plodding.

And Hope is an able and fiery player. (You can hear him tackle the opening chords of the second movement with the music sample provided here.) Now that I've discovered yet another masterpiece of the Western art tradition, I doubt I will ever find a need to go searching for another interpretation.