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The solution was a new work – the Duo concertant – surrounded by crafty arrangements of the most tuneful numbers in Stravinsky’s ballets.
Anthony Marwood and Thomas Adès are a great fit: the intensely musical fiddle player at home in new concertos or classical chamber music, and Adès the uncompromising composer-pianist. They begin with the first Suite Stravinsky arranged from Pulcinella, based on pieces thought to be by Pergolesi (it’s the first version of what became Suite italienne, and they’ve added the Scherzino from the later version as an extra on the second disc). Immediately you can hear neo-baroque elegance balanced with brittle Stravinskian exuberance, both players investing the motor rhythms with unstoppable momentum; Adès bubbles boisterously along, while Marwood spins ethereal harmonics or injects stinging venom through a colourful variety of bow strokes.
The Air and Chinese March from Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale are beautifully achieved, with the violin’s fluting song and delicate ornamentation staying effortlessly airborne, while the piano intrudes sudden bursts of muscular intensity, before subsiding into shimmering ripples.
The Duo concertant is a highlight; Marwood immaculately in tune whatever double stops, twists and turns Stravinsky throws at him, while Adès’s care with the separate strands of the piano part pay dividends. It can seem a cool, dry work, but emphatically not here.
The second disc is Stravinsky’s own selection of favourites from The Firebird, Petrushka and Mavra, and the substantial Divertimento he arranged from his deliciously affectionate homage to Tchaikovsky: The Fairy’s Kiss. The final item is a curiosity: a solo violin version of La Marseillaise that lasts barely a minute. Two CDs for the price of one, a fine recording, and an excellent souvenir of a canny composer, and two inspired duos, three-quarters of a century apart. --Andrew McGregor
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The first disc is much the more satisfying, built principally on the Duo Concertante of 1931-2 but the two pieces from The Nightingale are supremely subtle, even enchanting, and throughout the intelligence of Marwood's line and the real deftness in Adès's touch make one feel it's simply a treat to hear. The second disc is something of a rag-bag gathering of the remaining works, many of them ballet transcriptions dashed off by a Stravinsky who at that time was far less concerned about creativity than domestic economics. But a man of his genius found it hard not to create something special, and there are many pleasures to be had from all manner of nuances of tone and phrasing even in this lesser disc.
Marwood is wonderfully effective, genial, never less than thoughtful and his technique is never in question. Adès of course, like many top composers before him, is not really in his day job at the keyboard, but you would be hard pressed to hear that in any respect other than that his pianism is undoubtedly that of an ensemblist rather than a soloist - which of course is what he needs to be here.
Warmly recommended.
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