Brahms • Dvořák • Viotti: Concertos

Classical Music

michael.beek@ourmedia.co.uk

 November 30, 2023 

Brahms: Double Concerto; Viotti: Violin Concerto No. 22; Dvořák: Silent Woods

Christian Tetzlaff (violin), Tanja Tetzlaff (cello); Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Paavo Järvi

Ondine ODE 1423-2   60:43 mins 

Brahms and the late 18th-century violinist and composer Giovanni Battista Viotti may seem like odd bedfellows, but there’s a good deal of logic in their juxtaposition here. Brahms openly admired Viotti’s Violin Concerto No. 22, and his own Double Concerto for violin and cello, in the same key of A minor, contains distant allusions to it. The Viotti was also in the repertoire of Joseph Joachim, who made his own virtuosic edition of it (mercifully not used in this reading). Brahms’s concerto was designed to mend his relationship with Joachim: the two friends had fallen out over the violinist’s bitter divorce dispute, when Brahms sided with Joachim’s wife.  

The opening pages of Brahms’s concerto have the two soloists rhapsodising in recitative style, and the passage ends with them sweeping passionately upwards in parallel octaves, unleashing a lengthy and powerful tutti. The octave writing heard near the concerto’s beginning is typical of the work as a whole, and it’s one of its features that make it so awkward to play. Brother-and-sister team Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff are ideal soloists, and they’re splendidly supported by the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester under Paavo Järvi. Christian Tetzlaff plays the wild, gipsy-style finale of the Viotti with appropriate abandon and Tanja is an eloquent soloist in Dvořák’s hauntingly beautiful Silent Woods – the composer’s own transcription of the penultimate number from his piano duet suite From the Bohemian Forest. Misha Donat

https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/concerto/brahms-dvorak-viotti-concertos