Midori’s Bartók Violin Concerto No. 2 hails from early in her performing career when the very fact that the teenage violinist met the work’s daunting challenges with such security and seeming maturity was impressive enough on its own. However, the passing years have faded the aura of “wunderkind” around her playing (though she has since become an artist of major accomplishment) and this reading can be heard plainly for what it is: nicely done, but not very compelling. Midori lavishes much beautiful, buttery, warm tone on this music, but this is exactly the opposite of what the piece requires. Right from the start, Anne Sophie Mutter and Viktoria Mullova both take a more assertive, almost defiant stance with their sinewy timbres and bold projection. By contrast, Midori’s gentler way seems to suggest that although she knows the piece, she had not at this point lived with it enough to take the kinds of risks that make for a truly riveting performance. Zubin Mehta is a willing partner in this conception, as his accompaniment is a compendium of softened accents and smoothed-out sonorities–something of a specialty for the Berlin Philharmonic, which had only recently emerged from decades under Karajan–and Sony’s distant, somewhat murky recording underlines these effects.
On a positive note, Bartók’s rhapsodic early Concerto No. 1 proves a better match for Midori’s quasi-romantic approach. The disc also includes a rather useless “bonus track” featuring the finale of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Lovers of this work never could be satisfied with only the last movement–especially in Mehta’s drowsily played and mushily recorded rendition.
