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Britten Sinfonia/Kopatchinskaja - review

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  • Britten Sinfonia/Kopatchinskaja - review

    Britten Sinfonia/Kopatchinskaja ` review

    Patricia Kopatchinskaja captured the punch of Tigran Mansurian's
    Violin Concerto No 2 in a folk-infused programme


    George Hall
    The Guardian, Sunday 9 March 2014 18.11 GMT


    Dark-toned lyricism ¦ Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Photograph: Marco Borggreve

    When transcribed and arranged for the concert hall, folk music often
    loses its instinctive wildness and punch, but these essential
    qualities were retained in the folk-based items in this Britten
    Sinfonia programme directed by the Moldovan violinist, Patricia
    Kopatchinskaja.

    The most substantial example was the Second Violin Concerto by the
    Armenian Tigran Mansurian, born in Beirut in 1939. Composed in 2006,
    it finds its inspiration more in the texts of Brahms's Four Serious
    Songs than in the way they are set. The Concerto's intensity is
    derived from the way in which Mansurian inserts folk-inflected
    material into a harmonic template borrowed from early 20th-century
    modernism; Bartók adopts the reverse process in his Romanian Folk
    Dances, which followed here.

    Kopatchinskaja's inimitable range of tonal colours and dynamics came
    to the fore in both, boldly emulated by the ensemble's string players.
    Potent though the Concerto's dark-toned lyricism was ` especially in a
    reading as full-on as this ` its achievement was put in the shade by a
    performance of the Bartók that seemed, for once, to celebrate the
    rawness of the originals without smoothing away any of their rough
    edges.

    The concert's second half fell just short of the exalted level of the
    first. Despite the conscientious deliberation exhibited by all
    involved in Richard Tognetti's string-orchestral arrangement of
    JanáÄ?ek's "Kreutzer Sonata" quartet, the sparer original had lost much
    of its visceral impact. Mendelssohn's skilful D minor Violin Concerto
    ` written when he was just 13, and a fine example of his outstanding
    gifts as a teenage composer ` felt as if it had been drafted in from
    another programme, energetically played though it was. But the five
    Brahms Chorale Preludes, rescored by Paul Angerer from the organ
    originals, and interspersed throughout the evening, were magically
    done.

    http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/mar/09/britten-sinfonia-kopatchinskaja-review



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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