All three of these violin concertos were composed expressly for Renaud Capuçon, and all take his fiercely impassioned lyrical playing as their starting point. Bruno Mantovani’s single-movement Jeux d’Eau was the first to be completed: Capuçon gave the premiere in Paris in 2012, and like the other two works here, the recording is taken from the first performance. It treats the almost continuous solo violin line as the launchpad for a series of increasingly complex, sometimes almost delirious orchestral episodes that revel in the sensuous quality of the sounds themselves. The aqueous associations of the title are never far away, and the allusion to Ravel’s work of the same name may be hinted at in some of the textures too, though it is always kept at arm’s length.
If the background to Mantovani’s work is audibly French music of the early 20th century, it’s German expressionism that haunts Wolfgang Rihm’s Gedicht des Malers (Poem of the Painter), which Capuçon introduced last year. As I calculate it, this is Rihm’s fifth work for violin and orchestra; a single movement lasting about a quarter of an hour, in which the solo violinist is cast as a painter. That idea is a starting point for Heinz Holliger’s much more substantial Violin Concerto of 1995. Rihm’s real reference point, though, seems to be the Berg concerto – his music contains several near quotes. It’s still a perfectly conceived vehicle for the rhapsodic tendencies in Capuçon’s playing.
But it’s Pascal Dusapin’s Aufgang that provides the real substance here, and comes the closest to a traditional three-movement concerto. It was first performed in 2015 too, though its roots go back to 2008, when Dusapin started work on a violin concerto that he then set aside because he couldn’t find a soloist who was prepared to learn it. As completed now for Capuçon, though, it’s a wonderfully coherent work of irresistible sweep; the central slow movement, longer than the two outer movements together, provides the real expressive weight, but Dusapin’s solo part seems constantly to be reinventing and reconfiguring many of the traditional rhetorical devices of violin concerto writing; Capuçon makes every one of them wonderfully vivid.
