Was it really last April. I heard this concert on the radio but didn't realize that it was already that long ago. Maxim Vengerov took a four year sabbatical from playing the violin, apparently 'due to injury', and studied conducting and then did some before returning at the Wigmore Hall to play the second Bach Partita and the Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata. Now the concert is issued on a very reasonably priced disc and you don't want them staying piled up on the shelves in Amazon's warehouse and so I thought I'd better relieve them of one. It doesn't sound as if he lost much in those four years.
It doesn't matter that it seems strange to know it is a 'live' recording when there is no extraneous noise on it and no applause at the end either. I suppose they have been removed so that a certain kind of purist can concentrate on the pure performance but I don't mind at all at least the first bit of the audience reaction to a radio concert.
For such a momentous return, which some apparently doubted would live up to the hype, he could hardly have started anywhere else but with Bach. I'm not going to say that I prefer this mixing desk download of Bach to what I saw Tasmin Little do in Portsmouth a couple of years ago and I wonder if Vengerov is more imperious and technically perfect than Tasmin's spirited launch into a piece that she prefers to academic perfection. Which is not to say that Vengerov isn't spirited. I know that Bach can be likened to jazz and Glenn Gould certainly made the point but it isn't improvised, is it. It is written down and the reason why Bach is the very biggest name among composers is that mathematical shape can be passionate and, somehow, more passionate than unbridled passion as a result of and not in spite of the discipline.
The fifth part, the Ciaccona, is as long as the other four movements put together and leads us through some spectacularly deft touches. The whole thing is, of course, immaculate and far beyond any reservation I would have except that it still wouldn't be the recording I'd keep of a Bach partita if I could have only one.
And so, somewhat surprisingly for me, it is the Beethoven here that I am more interested in if only, or mainly, because I am less familiar with it.
Beethoven is passionate in a different way to anything in Bach, being a more tormented soul but there isn't too much torment here with it being, as he said himself, 'written in a very concertante manner' which for me suggests more of Mozart's lightness of touch than Beethoven's own sometimes more muscular attitude.
Itamar Golan accompanies on piano but it is more than accompaniment as the interplay between the two instruments, noticeably in the Andante, seems to be just as much the point as the opportunity for virtuoso violin playing. The most lasting impression of the piece on me is that I'm not sure I've ever heard Beethoven in quite such a good mood.
We also get the two encores from the concert on the disc- flashy pieces that it's not for me to call 'lollipops' - and I think we could have had some applause to fade out at the end of the disc if it didn't sound too incongruous to stick on there having not had any before. Perhaps there wasn't room. If a CD can only take 80 minutes of music, this is timed in at 79.52.
At the price, that is as much value as one is ever likely to get.
