Five stars: Essential listening—an exciting new Violin Concerto thrillingly performed.


GRIME Violin Concerto  Malin Broman (vn); Daniel Harding, cond; Swedish Radio SO  OUR 970867 (22:40) Live: Stockholm 12/15/2016 Reviewed from a WAV download: 44.1 kHz/16-bit

It’s great news that OUR are releasing the recording of the world premiere of Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto from 2016 as a Digital EP. I heard the broadcast of the first UK performance earlier this year with Leila Josefowicz playing the solo part. She was superb, and has been a magnificent champion of the work, but this new release gives us the chance to hear Malin Broman, for whom Grime conceived the Concerto. The composer says that she was immediately struck by the “ferocity, power, and passion” of Broman’s playing, but also by its tenderness and sensitivity. Little surprise then that the Concerto is characterized by music of notable intensity, sometimes violence, contrasted with far gentler material of an almost gauzy texture. It makes for engrossing listening and Broman’s inhabiting of the solo part on this new release is simply riveting.
The Concerto is formed of a continuous movement, divided into three main sections with interlinking passages of strikingly fantastical music between them. Grime often uses the orchestra to expand the solo part to create what she has described as a “three-dimensional effect” and the feel at times is rather like high-powered chamber music. The first movement immediately compels the listener’s attention with a series of lightening interjections between orchestra and soloist which is not a dialog exactly, more an exchange of unadapted statements: the woodwind in triplets and quintuplets, the violin “answering” in five bar sets of accented triplets. The music develops and becomes more complicated until Broman delivers a cadenza, playing at triple forte with breathtaking power, only for the orchestra to intervene after six bars. These interactions are excitedly repeated until it feels the violin has worn the orchestra down. The orchestral speed drops and it becomes quiet, “very still” as the score directs, whilst the cadenza continues at the section’s initial speed. It’s ingenious, highly effective writing, brilliantly realized here by Broman and the Swedish Radio Orchestra under Daniel Harding’s expert direction.
After a dreamlike connecting passage the much slower central section presents music of great beauty, with Broman playing with a matching depth of expression. Grime says that the whole piece sprang from initial fragments that she sent to Broman at the start of the compositional process which came to form this section. One can certainly feel it as a point of reference for what has gone before, but also very much see its influence on the thrilling third section. In this “finale” the momentum builds relentlessly, testing the soloist’s stamina, whilst Grime adds new colors to the orchestral palette we’ve not previously experienced. The ending is brilliantly effected, one feeling the violin still has more to say in its insistent speech of rapid semiquavers, but we hear it forced to come to an abrupt halt apparently because of brass chords of obvious, if not ominous, finality. The movement is again breathtakingly negotiated by Broman with superb support from Harding and the Orchestra.
It's perhaps a bit unfair to compare Broman’s approach to that of Josefowicz. I heard the latter’s performance in a radio broadcast just once, while I have had the luxury of listening to Broman a number of times now in the course of this review. I’ll just say that Josefowicz seemed to make more of the virtuoso aspects whilst Broman is concerned with meaning and authenticity. Not exactly the contrast between beauty and truth then, but not far off. Anyway, the far more pertinent point is that like all great works of art, there’s scope aplenty for interpretation in this fantastic addition to the concerto repertoire, which you can experience on this OUR release in first class recorded sound. Dominic Hartley