The Bloch concerto has been getting a good run on disc recently.
My last encounter was a reading that bordered on the revisionist
in terms of its explicit Hebraic fervour (see review),
given by Zina Schiff on Naxos. There I laid out some of the recorded
lineage in a work that’s never really become part of the mainstream
concerto repertoire. Put simply there’s a Szigeti-Totenberg-Bress
line that sees things, however differing tonally, in aristocratic
terms. And that’s broadly the line followed by Elmar Oliveira
in this Artek disc recorded in Kiev.
Tempi are standard
– he and Schiff come within seconds of each other in the first
movement for instance - and Oliveira plays with fine expressive
control throughout. The recording is fine, expanding well
and not as dramatically upfront as Naxos’s. Oliveira uses
a wide range of colours and attacks – from crystalline upper
to chewy lower strings. His first movement cadenza is authoritative
and commanding. Oddly enough in this performance the solo
line’s fluting, pirouetting galvanism put me in mind of Vaughan
Williams’ writing for the violin. The expressive hooded phrasing
in the central movement attests further to the affinity between
soloist and work whilst the finale catches the first movement’s
ethos with renewed control – excitingly done.
This is a fine
performance of the Bloch, cut from committed cloth. It doesn’t
subject the concerto to the kind of overhaul that Schiff did
– a one-off in any case – but sees it whole, with refined
fire.
The coupling is
Benjamin Lees’s 1958 Concerto. With its exploration of spiky
lyricism it seems like a progeny of the Prokofiev G minor
Concerto, written over twenty years earlier. It’s in any
case an imaginatively written work, strong on rhythmic incision
and percussive activity. The moments of lyricism deeply embedded
in it are seductive. There’s a rugged first movement cadenza,
and some gaunt brass writing in the unconsoling second movement,
which has its share of extroversion. The violin struggles
against the granitic orchestration but emerges to triumph
in the finale. Once again Lees uses percussion with dextrous
imagination and the solo violin, scurrying or chordally assertive,
drives things to an exciting conclusion.
So a well contrasted
pair of concertos, excellently recorded and finely played
all round.
Jonathan Woolf
see also Review
by Rob Barnett
Elmar Oliveira
(violin) 
