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.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress