There’s a lot of competition in this music, and this new Naxos release, while never less than competent, just doesn’t measure up. Rebecca Hirsch has made some excellent recordings for the “white label”, but this rendition of Berg’s Violin Concerto fails to satisfy on both emotional and (occasionally) technical grounds. The first movement goes well enough, with Hirsch and conductor Eri Klas bringing an appealing lightness to the Viennese waltz episodes. But when the mood turns tragic, Hirsch struggles to stay on pitch in her upper register (her very last, sustained note is particularly painful), and Klas underplays the second movement’s big central climax. The great adagio that follows has a curiously impersonal quality–the string playing lacks a degree of warmth at a comparatively fast speed and the soloist sounds small-toned when she most needs to sing.
The Lyric Suite goes best; it’s the strangest and in some ways least involving music on the disc, and Klas conducts it with both accuracy (especially in the central Allegro misterioso) and some measure of urgency. However, the Three Pieces for Orchestra badly need a healthy shot of Viennese decadence. The opening movement isn’t bad, but Reigen needs a more indulgent, lingering approach to its waltz rhythms and elusive Mahler quotations. In the final Marsch, Klas begins too quickly and too blandly. There’s little sense of menace, and the hysterical climaxes have nowhere to go given the already fast initial pulse. Ineffective hammer blows seal the fate of a conception that is cleanly played but otherwise lacking in distinction. Good but not ideally clear sound doesn’t get in the way of performances that in the final analysis are simply average, or perhaps a little above.
