Unsuk Chin’s first violin concerto was premiered 20 years in the past. It gained her the celebrated Grawemeyer award in 2004, and introduced her music to a global viewers. Chin had determined to not write one other violin concerto, preferring to discover different instrumental mixtures, however then encountered the taking part in of Leonidas Kavakos, which advised to her a wholly contemporary manner of approaching the shape. The result's her new work for violin and orchestra, subtitled Scherben der Stille (Shards of Silence); it was co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, which received to offer the primary efficiency; Kavakos naturally was the soloist, with Simon Rattle conducting.
Chin describes the brand new concerto as “a subjective portrait of and a dialogue with Leonidas Kavakos’s musicianship”. It’s a single motion lasting round 25 minutes, and solid as a collection of usually roughly juxtaposed episodes (the “shards” of the subtitle) which develop from the thematic kernel of repeated string-crossing harmonics with which the unaccompanied violin begins the work. The solo writing is strenuously demanding – Kavakos appeared completely relaxed with each one in every of its challenges – whereas the LSO relished all the standard glitter and playful fizz of Chin’s sound world. However this time there appears to be an undertow of deep seriousness to the brilliance too, which typically takes the music in unexpectedly darkish instructions.
After the premiere Rattle paired two works that had been each accomplished in 1924, however which might hardly be extra completely different. His account of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony appeared much less stark and implacable, much less forbidding maybe, than many interpretations, nevertheless it was imposing all the identical, and never as self-consciously moulded as a few of his different current Sibelius performances. In Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (the truncated “suite” from the ballet, relatively than the whole work, alas), the orchestra revelled within the rating’s vivid imagery: Bartók at his most aggressively dissonant. Some passages might maybe have been sexier, others extra violent, nevertheless it was all vastly spectacular.
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