![]() Despite one recent claim that this now rivals Bruch and Mendelssohn as a popular coupling, there are just four, including this one. But in this coupling the choice is limited: the concerti are not often heard together. The Sibelius alternatives are legion and often very distinguished, from Jascha Heifetz’s 1935 account, a recording which helped establish the work in the repertory, to much later in the century when three women, Ida Haendel, Victoria Mullova and Kyung-Wha Chung, were long-standing top recommendations. If not quite as distinctive as the Nielsen, this is still a fine interpretation. Some others make a bit more of the weirdly whistling harmonics than he does, but his passagework in the coda is impressively despatched. In the adagio di molto, Dalene is poised and evocative, and in the dancing finale his entry is as emphatic as its energico marking implies. They have just bid farewell to Sakari Oramo’s thirteen years at the helm with a Sibelius cycle including this concerto. The orchestral tutti at the Allegro molto is stirring enough in its Kalevala mood, but then the RSPO are quite at home with this composer. His long opening solo is poetic and restrained, and he gives the music its head from the veloce marking onwards. ![]() Dalene again meets its demands in both respects. This a large concerto in the classical mould is no less demanding technically and aesthetically than the Nielsen. The Sibelius too is a very good account but perhaps without quite the same sense of identification with the work one feels in the Nielsen, and certainly sees on the 2019 competition film. His leading recommendations were Vilde Frang (Warner, 2011) and Cecilia Zilliacus (dB Productions, 2014), neither coupled with the Sibelius. Andrew Mellor, in an authoritative piece, researched over twenty versions going back to 1947 for a “Gramophone Collection” on the concerto. If you wish to know more, locate the Gramophone May 2019 issue. There might be a better version of the Nielsen out there, but this surely belongs among the very best. The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and John Storgårds make very attentive collaborators. Above all, his virtuosity is everywhere apparent but nowhere self-regarding: technique at the service of the music and of Dalene’s vision of it. His lyrical playing is warm both in the tone he draws from his Stradivarius, and in the affection of his phrasing his intonation is sure. His way with the five cadenza or cadenza-like passages in the concerto is very arresting, in both execution and in the contrast he finds between them. This is not a concerto somehow failing to be “important”, to quote Simpson, but a demanding concertante work with a unique aesthetic, not easy to make as convincing as Dalene does. (Cho-Liang Lin needs 36:01, Maxim Vengerov 36:18, Baiba Skride 37:30, while Nikolaj Znaider, a judge at that 2019 Nielsen competition, has it both ways: 39:23 in the 2014 account on Warner, but just 35:08 on Dacapo in a 2015 live performance.) But there is also the matter of emotional scale, and in that regard Dalene is spot on. The concerto is sometimes referred to as a 35-minute work, so his 39:05 here is at one extreme. This studio recording revisits it with differences of detail but not of broad conception.ĭalene’s account, like the piece itself, is spacious. Swedish violinist Johan Dalene was 18 when he won the Nielsen competition in 2019 with a remarkably mature account of the work it is still available to watch free online. Robert Simpson claimed that, of Nielsen’s three concertos – for violin, flute, and clarinet – “it is significant that the biggest and most imposing of the three, the Violin Concerto, is the least important”.īut “important” is not synonymous with “attractive”, and one always welcomes performances of Nielsen’s appealing piece as good as this one. The Sibelius is long established in the central repertoire. The composers, born in the same year, both played the violin, yet their concertos make quite a contrast. The Nielsen and Sibelius violin concertos make an obvious coupling, and a good one. 7-10 June 2021, Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds Support us financially by purchasing from
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