Review: Joshua Bell and Sam Haywood at Wigmore Hall

Bell & Haywood

Joshua Bell and Sam Haywood at Wigmore Hall, London

11 December, 2012

Of all the violinists doing the rounds, Joshua Bell seems closest to the model of the mid-twentieth century greats who made their way in America – as comfortable in the serious repertoire as in showpieces and the old-style crossover. His Wigmore Hall programme – given with regular recital partner Sam Haywood – offered the kind of variety that we’re used to from this hugely popular American violinist. It alighted on the territory of some of the last century’s greatest – Heifetz and Oistrakh – and found him standing tall in their company.

Bell began with Schubert’s Rondo in B minor, D895 - a vigorous workout of a piece that tripped up the violinist more than once. Largely, though, his rapid finger-work was precise and his tone wonderfully clear. He was on surer ground in Richard Strauss’s Violin Sonata in E flat, Op.18, which revels in the kind of long singing lines that Bell is so good at carrying. It’s one of those finely crafted but rather anonymous early Strauss pieces that offers only glimpses of the instantly recognisable style familiar from the career that followed. Strauss struck his personal sound very suddenly in 1889, the year after composing the Sonata, with Don Juan; had we known him only from the Violin sonata, we’d remember a fiercely Romantic imagination coupled with forgettable melodies. There are some intriguing things, though, in the slow movement, such as the gently turbulent figures that dog the piano part – so delicately captured by Haywood – and the sudden burst of fire that grips the finale in its closing moments.

Bell suspects the influence of Gershwin (or at any rate, jazz) on Prokofiev’s Second Violin Sonata. I can’t hear it, but he placed Jascha Heifetz’s arrangements of Gershwin’s Three Preludes before the Sonata to make the point. The Preludes, originally for piano, sit a little awkwardly when spread between two instruments, but Bell’s swaggering way with them had an authenticity that I suspect only a New Yorker can muster.

Prokofiev originally composed the Second Violin Sonata for flute, adapting it for violin at the suggestion of David Oistrakh. He then wrote what became known as the First Violin Sonata – a work of such ferocious mechanical anguish that the Second can seem a pale flower beside it. Bell and Haywood, though, made it surging but nostalgic and richly coloured. Bell’s vivid sense of narrative flow carried it in a way I’ve never heard before, enriching it with a fragile turn of phrase that didn't negate power. The audience went wild for what followed – Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen and an arrangement for Chopin’s C sharp minor Nocturne – but it was the Prokofiev that stole the evening.

UK readers can hear the recital on BBC iPlayer until Tuesday December 18th.

Radio review - Rare Bowen and Wigmore celebrations

When planning what to do with this blog, it struck me that a vast amount of classical music broadcast on radio and, occasionally, TV, goes uncommented on and that, perhaps most importantly, lots of it is free.  Why not comment on stuff on the radio?  What’s more, much of it is available to listen to (in the UK) for up to a week after broadcast, so, unlike an unbroadcast concert, you could follow the links and listen for yourselves.  

And so, here is the first of what should be a weekly series of radio reviews.  Looking through the schedules, it became apparent to me that I might need to clone myself to cover everything interesting that BBC Radio 3 play in a week, so this will unfortunately have to be a roundup of select highlights.  And if I’ve missed something great, or even not string related, why not mention it in the comments?

On to some broadcasts that caught my eye.  The final concert of the 2011 English Music Festival in Oxfordshire (Monday, 30^th May – Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/David Hill) featured a couple of rarities, including the first ever performance of an early cantata by Vaughan Williams called The Garden of Proserpine (read more about the concert at Classicalsource).  The string music interest came in the form York Bowen’s Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 74, performed by that champion of the unusual, Rafael Wallfisch.  It wasn’t a first performance, but it must have been the first of modern times, having only recently been published and its appearance rides a recent wave of interest in Bowen’s music that has seen his discography swell.  I’ve not been that taken with Bowen’s music in the past, but this was more memorable; certainly patchy, but with an unexpected attack at the outset that reminded me most of Hitchcockian scores by Bernard Herrmann (I was initially dismayed that the usually excellent radio host Catherine Bott compared the sound of what was to come to that of film music – how often anything tonal and mid-century is likened to a movie score – but in this instance she was right) and it was most successful in the quiet mysterioso moments when Bowen resisted heaping too many elements on top of each other.  

Two starry concerts broadcast live from London’s Wigmore Hall marked the 110^th anniversary of the hall’s opening.  As the effusive tribute doc informed us, the hall was originally called the Bechstein Hall and its list of past performers reads as a roll call of the great musicians of the last century.  These two events lured some of today’s top players, the first of which featured the Takács Quartet and pianist Stephen Hough in music by Haydn, Beethoven and Dvorak (Tuesday, 31^st May).  The Takács are feted as the greatest quartet of our time and, surprisingly, I had only ever heard them before on disc.  The same concentration I have heard them bring to the Beethoven in their famous Decca cycle was present in Beethoven’s Op.135 and its wonderful slow movement was flowing and silken, but I was surprised by some of the more conspicuous rough edges from the violins.