Vilde Frang: Nielsen, Tchaikovsky – Violin Concertos (FLAC)

Composer: Carl August Nielsen, Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky
Performer: Vilde Frang
Orchestra: Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Eivind Gullberg Jensen
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Warner
Catalogue: 6025702
Release: 2012
Size: 285 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes

Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35
01. I. Allegro moderato
02. II. Canzonetta (Andante)
03. III. Finale (Allegro vivacissimo)

Nielsen: Violin Concerto, Op. 33 (FS61)
04. I. Part I: Praeludium – Largo
05. II. Part I: Allegro cavalleresco
06. III. Part 2: Poco Adagio
07. IV. Part 2: Rondo: Allegretto scherzando

In her third release for EMI Classics the energetic young Norwegian violinist continues the idea of Nordic and Russian concerto pairings established with Sibelius and Prokofiev Concertos on her first album. Here the famous romance of Tchaikovsky’s well-loved violin concerto and Scandinavian poise and unique colouring of Nielsen’s concerto are presented in a rare coupling together on disc.


Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote his violin concerto during the summer of 1911, in a small Norwegian lakeside hut belonging to fellow composer Edvard Grieg. The concerto is very close to Vilde’s heart, being written in her homeland Norway and premiered in Scandinavia by Danish violinist Peder Møller and the Royal Danish Orchestra. It is a work she is very keen to record and champion. The concerto is unashamedly developed around enticing melodies, giving it a delicacy and simplicity and conjuring up that sense of spaciousness which is so much a part of Scandinavia’s musical and physical landscape.


Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto needs little introduction and is perhaps the most famous of all violin compositions. It is also regarded as one of the most technically difficult pieces in the repertoire and so is a brilliant showcase for Vilde’s hugely assured virtuosity.


Vilde recorded her debut album with EMI at the age of 22. The recording of Violin Concertos by Sibelius and Prokofiev released in January 2010 was enthusiastically reviewed “rarely has this music sounded so tender, so intimate or so lyrical” (Financial Times) and Independent Record Review called her “prodigiously gifted”. The disc won Best Classical Release at the Norwegian Grammy Awards.


She has been compared to a young Anne-Sophie Mutter, with whom she often performs.

Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang made her debut in 2010 with a pairing of concertos by Sibelius and Prokofiev. She repeats the formula here with works by Nielsen and Tchaikovsky, a somewhat risky move. But the fact is that she’s exceptionally good in these repertories. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, is in a way a work constrained by its tremendous virtuosity and the long performing tradition of which it is a part. It’s hard to come up with something really new to say to it, but Frang makes a strong contribution with a graceful reading that avoids the tendency to push the big passages of the outer movement to a point just short of (or, in concert, just past) where a string breaks from the effort to get maximum volume out of it. Instead she favors detailed shaping of complicated stretches of passagework. It’s quite distinctive, but the real news here is the Nielsen Violin Concerto, Op. 33, which had its premiere in 1912 and is not terribly often performed. It’s a complex work in a mixture of idioms, from what annotator David Fanning calls neo-Baroque (actually much of it anticipates the sparkling neo-Mozartian language of the opera Maskarade), to developing figuration that anticipates the structures of Nielsen’s symphonic works, to Tchaikovskian passages. These last help tie the program together in a novel way: how did Nielsen, a generation after Sibelius, react to the sounds of Tchaikovsky in his head? The Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Eivind Gullberg Jensen is not much more than workmanlike, but this is overall a fresh treatment of some highly familiar music and some that is less so.