After Locatelli, Stravinsky and Schumann, Isabelle Faust makes four scores by Britten her own with the same mastery.
RA distant reflection of a troubled era, Britten’s violin concerto (1940) speaks from the territories of dreams, through disturbing visions or by borrowing the forms of the past. Always masked, in short. THE Moderate with motorcycle begins in a languorous twilight, adorned with the sumptuous colors that Jakub Hrusa obtains from the musicians of Bavarian Radio. The exchange with the bow soloist does not seek one-upmanship but balance: what the accompaniment adds in lyricism and opulence, Isabelle Faust subtracts to aim for transparency and sobriety. In this fluid mechanics, development acts as a seesaw. With persuasive grace, the violinist takes control of the orchestra. But as the coda brings back a bright D major, the sliding in double strings here reveals regrets. Behind the flight, a presentiment of the fall? The kinship with Berg’s music has rarely seemed so striking.
To lose my voice
Propelled to a breathtaking tempo stirred up by angry timpani, the Perennial central tears the veil. The natural inclination of Faust’s playing perhaps does not lead him towards unbridled ferocity, but what he might lack in power, it compensates for with the qualities which distinguish his Bartok and Stravinsky (HM): fluid articulation, precision of attacks, discursive assurance. Chained to the cadence of the scherzo, the Passacaglia The finale is thus guided from darkness to the invocation of dawn, to the point of losing one’s voice.
Two chamber scores written for the Spanish virtuoso Antonio Brosa, creator of the concerto, are treated with the same mastery. After the mists of Wake up (1937), a concert study mocking a late-rising dedicatee, it is with drypoint that the violinist draws the pastiches of the Suite op. 6 (1936), in perfect complicity with the piano of Alexander Melnikov. Brother of Isabelle, the violist Boris Faust joins them in a previously unpublished diptych from 1929, whimsical and full of boldness, where a teenage Britten savors the time of carelessness.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Violin Concerto (a). Wake up. Suite for violin and piano op. 6(b). Two pieces for violin, viola and piano (c).
Isabelle Faust (violin), Alexander Melnikov (piano) (b, c), Boris Faust (viola) (c), Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jakub Hrusa (a). HM. 2021-2022. TT: 1h04. Golden tuning fork
