Isabelle Faust - Jolivet - Concerto pour violon / Chausson - Poème (2006)

Before this release, Isabelle Faust had made several very fine recordings -- her Dvorák discs were deemed delightful -- and several good but not great recordings -- her Schubert and Schumann discs were judged well played but oddly too deracinated to be entirely effective -- but this 2006 disc was arguably her best yet. Of course, the coupling did not go down especially well with every listener: the aesthetic distance between Ernest Chausson's ardently late romantic Poème from 1896 and Jolivet's impressionistically post-modernist Violin Concerto from 1972 proved too vast for every fan of the former to enjoy the latter and for every fan of the latter to enjoy the former. But Faust, with the dedicated help of Marko Letonja and the Deutscher-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, did everything she could to make a cogent and compelling program of the disparate works. With her warm, round tone; bright, vivacious technique; and supple but persuasive sense of phrasing, Faust infused both works with equal measures of music, color, and light, and thereby drew a long, undulating line from Chausson's lush lyricism to Jolivet's austere lyricism. Captured in brilliantly clean and appropriately colorful sound by Harmonia Mundi, this disc, while not always easygoing, is still well worth hearing by any fan of French violin music.