Carolin Widmann - Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Robert Schumann (2016)

Recordings of Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, are abundant, and even the pairing with the rarer Robert Schumann Violin Concerto, WoO 23, of 1853 are not as infrequent as they used to be. The thorny Schumann concerto has undergone a reevaluation upward, and plenty of players now concur with the judgment of Yehudi Menuhin: "This concerto is the historically missing link of the violin literature; it is the bridge between the Beethoven and the Brahms concertos, though leaning more towards Brahms." Violinist Carolin Widmann who (like the ECM label on which the album appears) has focused mostly on contemporary music, takes up the challenge of providing something new here, and she meets it. The central fact of the recording is that Widmann conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Europe from the violin. Others have done this before, but few have pursued the implications of the technique as far as Widmann has: the performances are unusually light and transparent, and they are perhaps thus in accord with the sounds an orchestra of the middle 19th century might have produced. Sample the unusually lively, sprightly reading of the Mendelssohn concerto's finale. Widmann's open textures are perhaps even more important in the Schumann, with its rather ponderous opening movement, mysterious slow movement, and finale so technically difficult that it was long considered unplayable. It's not unplayable for Widmann, who clarifies a good deal of the music and participates in the continuing case being made for this concerto. With superb recording at the acoustically appropriate Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, this is a fine excursion into mainstream repertoire for all concerned.