[SACD-R][OF] Marianne Thorsen, TrondheimSolistene - Mozart Violin Concertos - 2006 (Violin, Orchestral)

AllMusic:
Norwegian violinist Marianne Thorsen (active mostly in England) & the Trondheim Solistene state here that they “wish to present a fresh version of the most elegant violin concertos in the history of music.” This being an audiophile release, they view the challenge in mostly technical terms. After struggling through a rather mysterious metaphor (“To us, Mozart is as solid as rock, as soft as snow, & as clear as ice”), one learns that “this recording embraces the listener in a sonic world that invites him or her to participate actively in the experience.” The recording of the last 3 Mozart violin concertos is quite unusual, beginning with the fact that the package includes 2 separate discs containing the same music — 1 a conventional CD & 1 a SACD.
The conventional disc was auditioned for this review, & even this represents a virtuoso feat of engineering. The sonic ambiance of the Norwegian church recording location is, it must be said, a bit too far on the live side; Mozart’s violin concertos weren’t performed in churches, but in well-upholstered rooms. But the combination of transparency & immediacy is impressive; microphones capture a strong sense of Thorsen’s physical presence, but her interactions with the small orchestra do not suffer. The strongest feature of the recording is not its raw engineering muscle but the interpretation that is constructed to match the sound environment: Thorsen devises an unusual reading that downplays the sometimes-overdone lyricism of these youthful, highly melodic works & broadens them out somewhat, allowing for the delineation of interior lines in the orchestra — they often seem to come out of nowhere in a delightfully lively way. One might be skeptical that a performance describable as “dry” would work with the Mozart concertos, but most of the time it does: performance styles are not absolutely right or wrong but work (or don’t) in specific situations. Only the final Turkish-style movement of the Violin Concerto No. 5 seems unnaturally tamped down. This is indeed a fresh version of Mozart’s violin concertos, & a fine gift for someone who has just acquired SACD equipment.
SA-CD.net review by ramesh January 3, 2007:
The Mozart violin concertos are well served on SACD, with this newcomer added to the ongoing complete series from Julia Fischer on PentaTone, & Manze in these last 3 ‘authentic’ concertos. Fischer plays with a larger, but still chamber orchestra, including harpsichord continuo for the 1st 2 concertos. Manze plays on a period instrument with a period orchestra. Thorsen’s orchestra is small; strings are 5,3, 3, 3, 1. Hence these 3 SACDs are complementary. Fischer plays her own cadenzas, & I am not familiar with those Thorsen plays.
As has been noted, this SACD (not strictly hybrid, as there is a separate CD enclosed in the sleeve, so one gets 2 discs for the price of 1) is recorded in the new DXD format of high rate PCM, to faciliatate editing. The Manze & Fischer discs are both native DSD productions. To get down to specifics, the sound of this SACD is amazing. For a demonstration, there is no better place to start than the ethereal opening of the adagio of K 216. The renowned musicologist Alfred Einstein wrote that this movement was ‘musical manna from heaven’, & marks the 1st occurrence of where Mozart’s ‘godlike genius’ was realized. Soundwise, the Mozart violin concertos never fared well on early SACDs, the combination of high solo violin, in front of a chamber orchestra with horns tending to produce sheens of awful glassy sound. Notable culprits were the integral set with Perlman & the VPO, & the Zuckerman disc with the ECO. The Manze SACD which I have previously reviewed, the Fischer discs & this new 1 eliminate all the faults of early digital.
In the adagio of the 3rd concerto, anyone who has sat close to a live performance of this sublime movement will surely have been struck by the breathy, limpid nature of the muted strings in a live acoustic, before the solo violin soars in its high cantilena. This disc is the 1st I have heard which fully preserves these attributes. Even the well-recorded Pamela Frank set on Art Nova from the late 1990s sounds 2-dimensional compared to this newcomer. [The Manze SACD has this to a lesser extent, not due to a recording fault, but because the effect is more prominent with modern metal strings. I have not heard the Fischer SACD of this concerto.] The other striking feature in this movement, as captured in the recording, are the pizzicati bass notes. These are superbly delineated : precisely localised in the soundstage, harmonically rich, & not swamping the muted strings. The timbre of the horns do not disappear into the glassiness of the strings as they were wont to do in early PCM digital recordings. Another impressive feature is the fidelity of the solo violin as recorded. One can hear that the soloist is miked closely, yet despite this, there is a remarkable absence of rosiny bowing, or hair clicking on strings.
Where do the performances stack up against the formidable competition? The most striking aspect on 1st hearing is that these performances are uniformly leisurely in tempo. Pamela Frank & Perlman are brisker in virtually all movements, as are Manze & Fischer on SACD. In fact, in terms of tempi, the closest comparison I could find were David Oistrakh’s versions on EMI with a velvet plush Berlin Philharmonic. In this case, Oistrakh is fleeter than Thorsen– quite some achievement! Mention of the Berlin Phil brings me to the set of Mozart wind concertos conducted by Karajan for EMI in the 1970s, featuring section leaders from his incomparable orchestra. This set met with some criticism, as it was felt that the self-effacing nature of the soloists meant that solo lines tended to dovetail excessively into the orchestral texture.
This would have been potentially the fault in this SACD if the disc hadn’t been recorded so well. In many sections, the impression is that Thorsen is playing in the manner of a chamber musician, which, ironically, is probably the way the concertos were written. This means a tendency towards homogeneity in texture. For instance, in the bravura sections of the 1st movements in all 3 concertos, most of the soloists tend to highlight the differences in texture in passages which sweep from the G string up to the E string, with the soloist relishing the gutty ‘digging-in’ of the bow to sound the lower notes. These sections are underremarked by Thorsen, which is a perfectly valid way of playing them, echoing the nature of the Karajan set mentioned earlier. However, 1 odd but welcome section of individuality occurs just before 8′ in the finale of the A major, where the orchestra play a sotto voce reprise of the Turkish theme as a parody cadenza.
The clarity of the recording means that sections of her playing which could have faded into the orchestra in a lesser disc, are still completely audible, both in the CD & SACD versions of the performance. One wonders, however, whether the fact that the recording gives her absolutely no leeway to fudge any note meant that she became slightly inhibited in the studio, concentrating on technical accuracy rather than giving herself wholeheartedly to bravura, as Manze strikingly does in some sections. Nevertheless, her playing is excellent.
~Copyright © 2007 Ramesh Nair and SA-CD.net

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