Given by the Basel Chamber Orchestra’s strings, this was an evening of two contrasting halves. Daniel Hope opened the concert as soloist and director in Bach’s A minor Violin Concerto and Mendelssohn’s Concerto in D minor for Violin and Strings, written when he was 12 and not to be confused with his later more famous Concerto in E minor. After the interval, leader Anders Kjellberg Nilsson took over for works by Bartók and Frank Martin.
There were disparities in quality. Hope’s emphatic way with Bach conferred a certain tragic loftiness to the concerto’s central andante, though intonation problems intruded all too frequently on the opening allegro. The teenage Mendelssohn was clearly influenced by 18th-century Sturm und Drang, although the D minor Concerto doesn’t quite warrant the hell-for-leather aggression with which Hope initially tore into it. The charm that offsets the drama was in shortish supply until we reached the finale with its playful key shifts and wry humour.
With Nilsson at the helm in the second half, the strings, with their austere sound and impeccable balance, came fully into their own. Bartók’s 1939 Divertimento was one of several key 20th-century works commissioned by the orchestra’s founder Paul Sacher as European modernism came under increasing threat from fascism. A howl of fury in dark times, it had tremendous authority and intensity. It was prefaced by Frank Martin’s Pavane Couleur du Temps, gravely eloquent, and played with supreme poise.
