For at least the first four minutes of the Violin Concerto on this new disc of music by Esa-Pekka Salonen, one is ready to be thrilled by any amount of exhilarating violin skittering and shattering of itself over a dreamy, impressionistic, lightweight accompaniment exploring a brightly-lit palette of sounds.
The second movement is restrained and thoughtful and then the third more deranged. Listening to it more closely, I'm not regretting buying it now after three or four hearings than I was at first. There is no doubting Leila's immense energy and technical mastery or that of the piece that Salonen wrote for her to play. But it used to occur to me quite regularly when some of my contemporaries enthused about various rock music guitar heroes that just because you can play like that doesn't mean you have to and it's up to me to decide whether it gives me any pleasure to listen to it. This is difficult music and in places quite noisy. I'm sure it would be tremendous in the concert hall to see it being done but I don't necssarily get excited just because the music I'm listening to seems to expect me to be.
The final movement of the concerto works its way to a bursting climax that ends on a more morose note and, it would appear, is a statement of the composer's unresolved world view. I am grateful to him for it without sharing all of it. But I'm enjoying it more on fourth hearing than I did before. It is undoubtedly a fine piece by a major composer of my generation. It's just that one can't be too careful reading newspaper reviews when the impression given by the reviewer is written from their point of view but you read their words from your own.
The 19.15 of Nyx is an orchestral piece definitely on a scale too big for me. I don't really buy this sort of thing apart from in the sense that I order it from Amazon in error. It's possibly things appearing in the night, bad dreams or anything like that but the more it imposes on us with its brass and dramatic intentions, the less I'm impressed.
You take your chances. It would be a dull world in which every record you bought outranked the previous one in one's list of all time favourites. I'm glad that I now know about Leila Josefowicz.
