The shimmer that ushers in the First Violin Concerto is arguably the closest Karol Szymanowski got to engaging with musical modernism. He seems to have remained wary of it, and even in the gorgeous textures and neurotic orchestral activity of the First Concerto there is the sense of keeping this exotic world at arms’ length, of never fully yielding to its charms. Tasmin Little’s performance of the work is rather like that too, highly polished but a bit aloof and detached, even though Edward Gardner conjures all the necessary colours from the BBC Symphony Orchestra around the solo line.
There is much more sense of engagement in the Second Concerto, Szymanowski’s last major work, where the squarer, folksy melodies and leaner orchestration seem to suit Little’s no-nonsense directness much better. Mieczysław Karłowicz’s much more traditionally romantic 1902 Violin Concerto is included on the disc, and hearing the confidence with which she attacks it, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Little is much more comfortable with its uncomplicated rhetoric than she is with the ambiguities of Szymanowski’s more subtly nuanced and coloured world.
