Beethoven Violinconcerto in a live Version with Benjamin Schmid, Orchestra Wiener Akademie on historic instruments and Martin Haselböck, Conductor, as a part of "ReSound Beethoven"
Cadenzas by Henri Vieuxtemps
Review:
Intoxicating Beethoven from the Brucknerhaus Linz
By Laurence Vittes, 17 October 2020
In a program originally scheduled for the Musikverein in Vienna, Martin Haselböck and his period instrument Orchester Wiener Akademie presented Beethoven's Coriolan Overture and Violin Concerto played by Benjamin Schmid, and two of Beethoven's obscure concert arias plus four Schubert Lieder orchestrated by Liszt, Brahms, Offenbach and Webern sung by Thomas Hampson. With all concerned tuned down to 430, including Schmid on a 1718 Stradivari strung with gut, the effect was intoxicating.
In Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Benjamin Schmid used non vibrato occasionally, added some flourishes here and there, varied his bowing widely in repeating sequences of triplets and 16th notes from striding to staccato, used portamento sparingly. But what stood out was his engagement with the development of Beethoven's narrative through the clarity of his line and his increasingly intense response to the emotional regions the music explores, capped by Henri Vieuxtemps' fiendishly difficult, unpredictable and violent cadenza.
In the Larghetto Schmid extemporized flourishes and connecting phrases imported from Beethoven's piano version, and varied the intensity and tightness of his trills. Vieuxtemps' cadenza paid unusual attention in thirds to the movement's slow theme, leading to an exhilarating Rondo which caught the orchestra not quite prepared for the velocity but ready in time for the big tutti refrains, urgent and surging, with the minor key interlude featuring a sweet-singing bassoon. After an upbeat that sounded like it came from the last movement of the Mendelssohn Concerto, the last of Vieuxtemps' cadenzas started long and then, like all his cadenzas, worked the solution out with a dramatic sense of Beethoven the revolutionary.
