Fanfare 3
*****
Helen Grime (b. 1981) is a British composer of Scottish ancestry (though she was actually born in York, England to Scottish parents who raised her in Aberdeenshire, Scotland). In 2016 she was commissioned by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra to write a violin concerto for soloist Malin Broman and conductor Daniel Harding. Though it’s not clear whether the performance heard here is a live recording of the premiere or a studio version made either shortly before or shortly afterwards (there’s no applause or audience noises), it does present the work played by the people for whom Grime wrote it. It’s a so-called “digital EP” from the fascinating OUR Recordings label.
“My Violin Concerto came about after several collaborations with Malin Broman and many years of gestation,” Grime tells us in her liner note essay. “We first worked together with Malin’s piano trio (Kungsbacka Trio), but I also had a chance to work with the orchestra, conducted by Daniel Harding with Malin leading, in 2010. I was immediately struck by the ferocity, power and passion in her playing. At turns she is able to play with a sort of wild abandon but also with great tenderness, sensitivity and with many different colors. I knew when we started talking about the piece some years back, that I wanted to highlight and showcase these striking, opposing qualities. Violent, virtuosic music covering the whole range of the violin is contrasted with more delicate and reflective filigree material that features oscillating natural harmonic passages and searching melodies.”
Judging from this performance, Grime certainly succeeded in her goals for the work. The overall impression of this work, composed in three movements but played without interruption, is of a violent and forthright piece. Reviewing the world premiere on December 15, 2016 in Stockholm, Chris King of the St. Louis American wrote, “The soloist almost never rested and almost always played at a feverish pitch. Grime wrote only scraps of melody for the other instruments; the brass section played such short lines it was almost used for percussion, and when anyone other than the soloist played as many as 12 notes in a line, it felt like an event.” There are sporadic moments of lyricism, mostly in the slow second movement, but for the most part this is hard-charging modern music that makes one wonder how Grime and Broman can do this to the 1709 Stradivarius on which Broman plays.
When I first listened to the Grime Violin Concerto, the composer I was most reminded of was Bartok. Then I got out recordings of Bartok’s own violin concertos (both with Isaac Stern as soloist; No. 1 with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, No. 2 with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic).
While the overall musical language was similar, Bartok, especially in Concerto No. 1, emphasized the lyrical over the violent while Grime did just the reverse. Grime describes the composition process for her concerto as an in depth collaboration with Broman. “Towards the beginning of the writing process, I sent Malin various fragments of material, and many of these are used in the concerto,” Grime wrote. “These initial sketches actually became the basis for the piece’s central section, and everything else sprang from this.”
Overall, if you like Bartok’s concertos you’re going to like this, too. My one regret with this “digital EP” release is there isn’t more of it. Grime’s online presence lists various other pieces that would have made great companions for this, including an oboe concerto premiered in 2003 with Grime herself as the soloist, and a 2024 work called Folk for soprano and large orchestra. Folk was inspired by a novel by fellow oboist Zoe Gilbert, who supplied the texts for Grime’s orchestral five-song cycle. But it’s a measure of how much I loved Grime’s violin concerto that I want to hear more of her music. Mark Gabrish Conlan