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| Naxos (Super budget price) (CD) 8 550489 (61 minutes: DDD). |
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Korean violinist, Polish orchestra, English conductor—what could be firmer proof of Elgar's regained international status than this new Naxos recording of the Violin Concerto, with Cockaigne to fill out the disc? An excellent recording, too, its only fault being the usual tendency to mike the soloist too closely. Even so, this is not as distracting as in many other concerto recordings and the balance on the whole is satisfactory. For example, both Adrian Leaper and the engineers allow us to hear plenty of the ravishing orchestral detail in the slow movement.
Dong-Suk Kang plays the work with insight and understanding, as if he had been brought up on the slopes of the Malvern Hills. Technically, too, it is a marvellous performance, in the Heifetz class where sheer virtuosity is concerned, but generally warmer. Tempos are fast, but no faster than the composer's own, and there is no loss of expressiveness in the cantabile passages. Some may find the soloist's tone on the G string slightly 'nasal' but not to any damaging extent.
The orchestra, too, plays the music with every indication of familiarity. It always was chauvinistic nonsense to say that "only British orchestras can play Elgar". This, in reality, was a code-phrase for "only British orchestras ever do play Elgar", but that is no longer true and it is obvious in this case that Leaper has conveyed his own understanding of the music to the instrumentalists. The string tone is warm and flexible, the brass rich and sonorous. For my own taste, Dong-Suk Kang is just a bit on the cool side in the great cadenza, but we all have our ideal version of this passage in our minds and rarely hear it realized. (Having written that, I played it again and liked it much more!)
An exuberant and poetic performance of Cockaigne not only confirms Leaper's credentials as an Elgarian (with a sense of humour, too), but adds to the attraction of a highly recommendable super-budget-price issue.
MK