The Shostakovich anniversary year will expand the already generous catalogue of the composer’s recordings, but this one shouldn’t get lost in the crowd. Daniel Hope, currently violinist of the Beaux Arts Trio, joins with the composer’s son Maxim and the BBC Symphony in the two violin concertos premiered by their dedicatee, David Oistrakh. Newer recommendable versions abound, but Hope more than holds his own against the competition.
In the First Concerto, no one matches the incomparable Oistrakh for warmth of tone, the manic hysteria of his Scherzo, or his pyrotechnic fiddling in the final Burlesque. But Hope navigates the brooding interior monologue of the first-movement Nocturne with flowing concentration and does the Passacaglia and the long Cadenza movement with captivating intensity. Sakari Oramo (for Josefowicz) finds more detail and strength in the orchestral writing than does Maxim Shostakovich, but that may reflect the up-front engineering of that disc. Hope’s leaner timbre doesn’t have the warmth of Vengerov or the burnished richness of Josefowicz. But such comparisons become invidious since it can be argued that Hope’s tone is more suited to the raw emotion of the work. Hope’s Passacaglia, for example, has both the sense of fragility inherent in the music and its sense of halting, upward striving, and he invests the hectic finale with just the right sardonic touch.
He’s also impressive in the Second Concerto where his lyrical opening has just the right touch of sadness, and he makes the introspective cadenza a moving experience. If the long Adagio movement doesn’t escape a sense of meandering, you could say the same for Vengerov’s. In both, the conductors seem to impose a heaviness missing from more flowing accounts such as Oistrakh’s. But Hope’s playing there is quite wonderful, with long-lined phrasing and a firm tone even in pianissimo passages. In the last movement his light touch carries the day against the aggressive grotesquerie of Shostakovich’s scoring, with its violent horn and drum eruptions. The disc includes the Romance from Shostakovich’s music from the film The Gadfly, a welcome bonus in which Hope’s lush playing accentuates the warm glow of the music.
If King David’s recordings of the concertos still reign supreme, they should be supplemented with a more recent version that’s brilliantly played, interpretively sound, and better engineered. Hope’s disc qualifies on all those counts, and has the convenience of coupling both masterpieces on a single disc, earning a hearty recommendation. [7/17/2006]
