Composer: Niccolò Paganini, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari
Performer: Francesca Dego
Orchestra: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Daniele Rustioni
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Catalogue: 4816381
Release: 2017
Size: 1.23 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: cover
Paganini: Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 6
01. 1. Allegro maestoso
02. 2. Adagio espressivo
03. 3. Rondo. Allegro spiritoso
Wolf-Ferrari: Violin Concerto in D Major
04. 1. Fantasia
05. 2. Romanza
06. 3. Improvviso –
07. 4. Rondo finale
This album marks Italian violinist Francesca Dego’s debut orchestral recording on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
It features two Italian masterpieces: Wolf-Ferrari’s seldom-performed Violin Concerto and Paganini’s renowned Violin Concerto Number 1, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year.
Francesca recorded Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto live in March 2017, when she gave the UK premiere of the piece at Symphony Hall with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the renowned Italian conductor Daniele Rustioni.
Francesca regularly appears with the world’s leading orchestras, performing both the Paganini and Wolf-Ferrari concertos extensively in the future.
The young violinist Francesca Dego, of Italian and American background, has made a splash in the mid-2010s not only with virtuoso repertory but with Beethoven’s violin sonatas. This recording, her fourth for Deutsche Grammophon, marks her concerto debut. The Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 6, is marked by seemingly unthinkable chains of double-stopped thirds for the soloist in the outer movements. Dego, as you might expect, handles these just fine, but the performance’s attractiveness resides as well in a less commonly noted factor: the orchestral accompaniment. Whether or not this is because the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is conducted by her husband, Daniele Rustioni, the performances here crackle with an unusual level of coordination and suppressed humor. Dego, a student of, among other players, Ruggiero Ricci, has the right mix of technical equipment and fire to carry off real virtuoso repertory. The only chink in her armor at this point is melodic, lyrical material, where she’s fine but not as rich as her mentor Ricci. This is too bad, for performances of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 26, are not abundant. Again the sweep of the work and the meshing of soloist and orchestra are impressive; the inward melodies of the piece, reflective of a doomed love affair between the 70-year-old composer and a 27-year-old student, are less persuasive. It is nevertheless good to have the Wolf-Ferrari concerto, and the Paganini is a great deal of fun.