Korngold, Chausson, Bruch – Steinbacher

Some concertos live or die by the memory of Hollywood back-lots, and Korngold’s does. You can hear the sound stage in it — the shimmer of strings meant to accompany Errol Flynn crossing swords in Technicolor, the harmonic language of a man who scored Anthony Adverse and The Prince and the Pauper and never quite stopped, even when the medium changed from celluloid to concert hall. Written in 1945 for Huberman, though Heifetz got there first on record, the Violin Concerto in D wants a soloist who has absorbed the smell of the studio lot along with the notes.

Arabella Steinbacher plays it beautifully. That is not quite the same thing as playing it rightly.

Her tone is silvery, her intonation exact, and the double-stops in the outer movements come off with an ease that suggests she has never once worried about missing one. But something is held back — a reluctance, maybe, to lean into the vulgarity that made this music work in the first place. Korngold’s harmonic world is drenched in unashamed sentiment; it needs a player willing to wallow, at least a little, before pulling back to dry the tears. Heifetz, in his 1953 album with Wallenstein and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, playing music born five miles up the road, dug into the second movement’s Romance with a portamento that today would get a student marked down in a conservatory jury. It is glorious anyway. Steinbacher, by contrast, keeps her composure. The Romance here turns oppressive rather than intoxicating: too slow, too careful, air conditioning where there should be humidity. The finale redeems some of this. Foster and the Gulbenkian players find real bounce in the rondo, brass articulating with a grin you can practically see. But a concerto is not saved by its last five minutes alone.

Chausson fares better, and here Steinbacher’s reticence becomes a virtue rather than a liability. The Poème (1896) is not a display piece; it is atmosphere first, incident second, and its opening bars — muted strings, harp, a violin line rising almost apologetically out of the texture — depend on exactly the kind of interior, veiled tone Steinbacher produces naturally. The Turgenev tale behind it, of a performer’s enchanted violin and a woman feeling new life stir within her as she plays his melody unknowingly on the organ, gives the piece its strange erotic undertow. Chausson’s chromaticism, pure Franckian inheritance, filtered through a sensibility that would be dead of a bicycle accident within three years of finishing it, asks for restraint, patience, colour rather than declamation. Steinbacher supplies all three. Foster paces the climaxes without rushing them, letting the orchestra swell and recede like something breathing rather than performing. I found myself more moved by these sixteen minutes than by anything in the Korngold.

The Bruch, tucked in as if an afterthought, is the least interesting choice on the disc and also, oddly, one of the more satisfying performances. Steinbacher plays it straight, without the arch mannerisms some violinists bring to a warhorse they’ve long since stopped respecting. The G minor concerto (1862) doesn’t need reinvention. It needs conviction and a singing line, and gets both.

Pentatone’s engineering is plush — multichannel SACD sound that flatters the Gulbenkian strings without artificial sheen — and Foster is a sympathetic, unshowy partner throughout. But this disc lives and dies by the Korngold, and there the comparison with Heifetz is not close. Buy this for the Chausson. For Korngold, go back to 1953, hiss and all.