Not everyone who loves Elgar’s Violin Concerto is going to love Christian Tetzlaff’s new recording of it, but nobody will find it bland. What’s perhaps most striking is the pace of the performance, which knocks minutes off anybody else’s: Tetzlaff could have packed up and left the building by the time, say, Vilde Frang gets offstage. Egged on by the conductor John Storgårds – who has the BBC Philharmonic sounding electric – Tetzlaff often runs towards moments of burgeoning intensity, rather than broadening out into them, and the effect is exhilarating. The downside is that some of the more densely woven passages sound fragmented this way; Tetzlaff is like a cat playing with a mouse, continually tensing, ready to pounce.
It’s not by any means all rushed, though. Sometimes Tetzlaff is introspective where other violinists are assertive, and vice versa; the phrases that tug at the heart are not always those you would expect. It’s a genuinely refreshing performance.
A similar energy courses through Thomas Adès’s 2005 Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, Tetzlaff stressing urgency over lyricism, Storgårds shaping the orchestral music into huge arcs. The muscular second movement unfurls with accumulating, juggernaut intensity; the third has its catchy little melody anchored by the orchestra’s bass in a way that conjures centrifugal force.
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