Written in a two-year span (when the composer was between 17 and 19 years old), Mozart’s violin concertos progress from the Baroque models of the Concerto No. 1 to the confident and expressive Concerto No. 5. They are enormously popular works, with perhaps hundreds of recorded versions of the individual concertos currently in print. Now, here comes one more contender to the ranks of complete sets. Pamela Frank has some wonderfully playful moments, as in the opening Allegro aperto of the A major concerto, where she darts between strings, her fingers running up and down the neck of her violin with a child’s exuberance. But for the most part she is too cautious a soloist, afraid to take much of an expressive stand in this music, and conductor David Zinman holds the orchestra too firmly in check as well. (It’s worth noting that the cadenzas for the first four concertos were penned by Zinman.) Between them, soloist and conductor never grab the reins and direct the music; rather, the score just happily carries them along.
These are certainly competent performances, clean and brisk with good sound (and it’s nice to have the filler Haffner selections, whose three movements take the form of a violin concerto), but the overall effect is insipid Mozart: pleasant background music but nothing more. Aural wallpaper has its place, I suppose–just ask the program directors at many American classical music stations–but for complete sets of blood-and-flesh Mozart, turn to Grumiaux on Philips or Perlman on DG. While Arte Nova’s trump card is its price point, these other recordings are midline priced, making for only a few dollars’ difference–a few dollars well spent for classic performances.
