We now hear our "elite" violin concertos in their entirety

As we edge forward with our Mendelssohn "sidebar" -- as I just explained -- it's time to hear these concertos in full.

[TUESDAY UPDATE: You might watch for updates to this post, like the one I just added for the Brahms Concerto.]

Last week ("Rondomania: A quick hit at violin-concerto rondo finales looking back from Mendelssohn to Mozart and Beethoven and ahead to Brahms and Sibelius"), pursuing the Mendelssohn "sidebar" that grew out of the Nov. 28 post "One Sunday afternoon in
August 1943 in Carnegie Hall . . .," we listened to the great chain of violin concertos with rondo finales stretching out before and after Mendelssohn. I said at the time that I'd really like to be able to present those concertos in full. Well, here they are!

This all still needs to be integrated with a mostly written first part that continues the Mendelssohnian thread. And probably it should be improved in all sorts of other ways. I wouldn't hold my breath about that part, though. -- Ken

AGAIN, WE REALLY HAVE TO START WITH MOZART

In our original consideration of the place of the rondo finale in the line of the great violin concertos, we started with Mozart --

• not because he invented either the violin concerto or the rondo or even the use of the rondo in violin (and other) concertos, which he didn't, but because he grasped the possibilities of this combination in a way, or ways, that made it stick.

• and not because Mozart's violin concertos, taken on their own, are equivalent in stature to the line of violin concertos they did so much to inspire. The form -- the Classical concerto, that is, not to be confused with the Baroque one -- was still too new to aspire to that stature. (Thank you once again, Herr Beethoven.)

Not that the three "mature" concertos (which followed with scarcely any separation from the not-yet-mature ones) can't still hold their own on a concert platform. But you kind of feel that the audience needs at minimum a somewhat bigger kick, and the performer has to put out a portion more to earn his/her fee. So, with no disrespect to any of these much-loved works, I'm thinking of them maybe more as a collective than as separate entires in our violin-concerto sweepstakes. (If it were piano concertos we were tracking, I'm not sure I would take the same position. But Mozart's piano concertos come from a more developed stage of his creative energies. There are at least half a dozen Mozart piano concertos I'd consider worthy of inclusion in such a survey.

BUT: We're skipping the Mozart Violin Concertos Nos. 1-2

Continuing with our Mendelssohn "sidebar," moving backwards through the E minor Violin Concerto we reach the 2nd movement

-- from Classic FM

Jascha Heifetz, violin; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. RCA, recorded in Symphony Hall, Feb. 23 & 25, 1959

Arthur Grumiaux, violin; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Jan Krenz, cond. Philips, recorded September 1972

Johanna Martzy, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra, Wolfgang Sawallisch, cond. EMI, recorded in Kingsway Hall, June 9-10, 1954

Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra, Efrem Kurtz, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, April 1958

by Ken

I know, I know, this is a heckuva way of doing things. Midnight came and went, with a column called Sunday Classics, which thereby purports to appear on, you know, effing Sunday, and there was midnight, or rather there went midnight, and I was still making more audio files, presumably in some sort of effort to illustrate some kind of point -- God-only-knows what kind. (Probably not even God knows, but only because He has more useful things to worry about and doesn't care. Can anyone blame Him?) All I can say about this way of doing things is that I plan to figure out a better one and have it at the top of my "to do" list. I bet it'll be up and running by next week. I feel sure of it.

Well, pretty sure.

Only wait! There is a point here. In recent times I've been making increasingly frequent references to "what it is we're looking for in music" (or, really, any other art form), why we get involved with it, what we think it can do for and to us, and what it actually can do for and to us. And here in these 7-8 minutes of gorgeous musical outpouring are the answers. Why we're here, what it's all about, what we hope and dream, what challenges and sorrows us, how we nevertheless persevere. It's all there. Of course it's all still in musical form, so we still have to decipher it.

And of course a significant part of the musical genius is that it can provide such overwhelming beauty-in-sound as it offers up its secrets. It can do so even when the news it bears isn't happy -- or even is out-and-out tragic. And nobody does this better than Jascha Heifetz, as we can hear in his Mendelssohn Andante. Or note the even more arrestingly beautiful tone of Arthur Grumiaux, and the seemingly unconditional openness and forthrightness.

If you're not familiar with Johanna Martzy, her Andante is a splendid sample of the deep introspection and passion she served up in a career that somehow never measured up to her abundant gifts. And I encourage you to check out a deeply knowledgeable and understanding 2018 appreciation by Sudip Bose in The American Scholar, marred only by the off-putting -- no, let's call it what it is, "repulsive" -- title, "The Cult of Johanna Martzy." There really is a Martzy cult, as he describes in pungent detail at the outset: a cult of record collectors who pay mind-boggling prices for original issues of her sadly limited recorded output, prices based mostly on rarity rather than artistic merit. But the meat of the piece is precisely Martzy's considerable and singular artistic merit. (I was intrigued by Bose's enormous enthusiasm for her recording of the Dvořák Violin Concerto that I searched it out online, and was impressed enough that we're going to hear it in our violin-concerto survey.

Here's a sample. Our little clip begins with a brief but grabbing slow section that probably sounds to most listeners like a newly begun slow second movement. In fact, this little section marked "Andante moderato" is a kind of postlude to the first movement, or maybe just the start of a transitional section.


Johanna Martzy, violin; RIAS Symphony Orchestra (Berlin), Ferenc Fricsay, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, June 1953


SPEAKING OF THE "ELITE"-VIOLIN-CONCERTO, THAT'S WHERE
WE'VE BEEN HEADING. MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST DIVE RIGHT IN!

Rather than tack it on to this post, I'm going to just leave it in the form it's been parked in, and direct you there from here.