Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47
The Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Soloist: David Oistrakh
Columbia Masterworks Recording
Violin Concerto in D Minor
1st movement: Allegro moderato
2nd movement: Adagio di molto
3rd movement: Allegro, ma non tanto
It’s going to a very exciting month of November on here, some cool things lined up on the podcasting and literary side of things. In case you missed some of the highlights for October: please check out our interview with artistic director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors, plus our first review of a live performance since the plague began (FFDN’s 2020 Signature Program, courtesy of the immensely talented Emily Trace). My other passion project, smART Magazine, also launched its first issue in October. Where getting ready for Issue #2 now and I’m very excited to see how this space grows. It’s a work in progress, lots of playing around, but I feel a strong sense and belief in its need in Toronto’s art-scene—grateful to Lighthouse Immersive for taking this on. Check it all out, pass it on!
The month-long affair with one of my favourite composers, Sibelius, ends this week with his Violin Concerto. My relationship with this concerto grew organically over the last five years, even before I was particularly gung ho for the genre. At first it was the craggy figurations of the final movement that kept me coming back, then as the catalogue of violin concertos that I was similarly enamoured by grew, the unique wintry glow of this immense yet compact one-off shown all the more. Listening to it this week, in comparison to last year for example, it’s the slow movement that really sticks—despite being the least interesting part of the last time I heard it performed live with the TSO (also check out my interview with the soloist for that occasion, Jonathan Crow).
This time around I think I’ve found a new apex of the concerto for me: the soloist’s devilish trill that crisps the very tip of the impossibly long figure at the bottom of the slow movement. The figure pushes higher and higher in octaves, beyond the intuitive punctuations of typical phrasing to suspend a precipitating single note above the mass of the orchestra’s accompaniment. I don’t think there’s a more rapturous passage in this whole collection; the rest of the movement is but convalescence from the tremendous heights of this cadenza cliff.
I find myself at odds now with musicologist Robert Philip’s assessment that for a performance to work, “The rhapsodic passages of the first movement need careful control if the pieces is to hold together as a coherent whole,” but counterintuitively “The second and third movements, by contrast, can scarcely fail if played strongly and competently.” Counterintuitive because it’s the pyrotechnics of the first and third movement that can rescue a subpar performance, while there’s nowhere to hide mistakes in the sombre and clairvoyant spotlight of the slow movement (altogether I’ve become just a bit more suspicious of Philip’s judgement after realizing that, despite the invaluable resource of his Classical Music Lover’s Companion, the 1000-page tome passes without the mention of a single female composer or composer of colour…hmm).
The spell of this slow movement, however, doesn’t wait till the aforementioned passage, it’s cast right at the start with a eerie duet between clarinets and oboes (reminiscent of the same enchanted air as the Swan of Tuonela suite). The soloist emerges from this mist with a sharp melody, softened by the gentle pour of four horns and bassoon. Pizzicato on cellos and violas acts as handrails for the soloist’s slow ascent while a syncopated bass rhythm peppers in some drama down below (there’s a little shoulder-bop that Hilary Hahn does to a similarly syncopated rhythm in the third movement, in her performance with Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France from last year, that I can’t get out of my head every time I hear that bass rhythm). Thereafter violins join in to repeat the clarinet-oboe duet from earlier, which the trumpets respond to with their rendition of the aforementioned syncopated rhythm. Cross rhythms on solo violin marks the start of the intractably complex figurations, cushioned by the main theme on wind and violas, and climaxing, eventually, in those devilish octaves.
The Sibelius solstice is officially over on here, here’s to another year till the next one…
SONG OF THE WEEK: ‘Extra’ — Luedji Luna
As always, the music in October was exceptional—a persistent trend I can’t explain aside from being under the influence of the invigorating coolness of the temperature and how the light catches the beautiful sizzling death of leaves and so on. With working from home, I’ve been listening to more music than ever, harvesting it by the basket-full, hearing new things and making time for old finds I swore I’d come back to (as I write this I’m listening to Ray LaMontagne’s Gossip in the Grain as if for the first time).
‘October’ by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1878
Over the years I’ve found myself saying everything hereafter is extra, though I’ll thereafter proceed to clutch unto ambitions too dearly, as if my existence depended on it. It’s a funny sentiment to be possessed by: indicating both the utmost gratitude (how could I want anything more than this) and yet you can sniff in it the utmost resignation—how could there be anything more than this. As a truce between the two: I’ve resolved to believe there are simply years that mean the former, and years that mean the latter. Viewed that way, it becomes almost a virtue of its own, to quantify and record the otherwise insignificant passage of time.
At any rate, Luedji Luna is the syncopated samba revelation I’ve been looking for, and I’m completely obsessed at the moment.
Throwback to: YR3 WEEK13, YR2 WEEK13
Click here for the full 2020/2021 roster of selected recordings