It was not until late in life that Robert Schumann found the path to the
violin. A pianist by profession, it almost seems as if his belated
interest in the violin had a lasting effect on the performance and
reception of his own works for that instrument. His Fantasy for
violin and orchestra, op. 131, has never truly found a place in the
repertoire; performances of his violin sonatas are relatively rare; and
the Violin Concerto had to wait until 1937 for its première, when it was
played in a bowdlerized version by Georg Kulenkampff and the Berlin
Philharmonic under Karl Böhm. The latter work probably suffered as well
from the unjustified verdict of the great Joseph Joachim, who called it
'weak' and spurned it to the end of his days.
As so often in music history, the vitality of a work can only be proved
by committed performers. One such performer was Yehudi Menuhin, the
first to forcibly elevate the Schumann concerto into the
classical-romantic pantheon: 'This concerto is the historically missing
link of the violin literature; it is the bridge between the Beethoven
and the Brahms concertos, though leaning more towards Brahms'.
Mendelssohn's E-minor Violin Concerto did not face the same problems of
genesis and reception as Schumann's. On the contrary: it is one of the
most frequently performed of all the great classical-romantic concertos,
not least because it refuses to consign the orchestra to a bystander
role, as in the virtuoso concerto. Instead, it follows Beethoven's
example by achieving a balanced dramatic structure between the soloist
and an orchestra with symphonic functions rather than an accompaniment
role.
If we pay heed to Menuhin's shrewd assessment and their dates of origin,
the combination of Mendelssohn's concerto with Schumann's seems much
more convincing than the more popular combination of Mendelssohn's and
the Bruch G-minor. This explains why the Munich violinist Carolin
Widmann has now chosen the Mendelssohn and Schumann concertos for her
new recording with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe for ECM's New Series.
Since 2008 her commitment to ECM has led to a number of remarkable CD
releases, including a highly acclaimed recording of the Schumann violin
sonatas with the pianist Dénes Várjon and a multiple prize-winning
Schubert recording with Alexander Lonquich.
But a commitment to classical-romantic music is only one facet in the
musical cosmos of this versatile artist, who numbers not only Schumann
but Morton Feldman among her 'favourite composers'. She is equally au fait
with period performance practice and avant-garde techniques and has
presented convincing readings of highly-complex works by Berio and
Boulez, Feldman's Violin and Orchestra (released on ECM) and Erkki-Sven Tüür, including his Noesie – Concerto for Clarinet, Violin and Orchestra with her brother Jörg Widmann on clarinet and the Nordic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Anu Tali (likewise on ECM).
Boulez, incidentally, gave an interesting answer to the question of
whether one should play the music of György Ligeti to gain a better
grasp of the music of the past. Boulez said that one would at least gain
a better performance culture. Anyone who masters Ligeti's sonic balance
and Stockhausen's rhythms will, he felt, be better equipped to play the
classical-romantic repertoire. Carolin Widmann's performances stand as
proof of his theory. (ECM Records)
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