Bruch Violin Concerto and Scottish Fantasy – Braunstein

Every violinist with a career worth having eventually records the Bruch G minor concerto, usually paired with the Scottish Fantasy, and the resulting shelf of recordings by now groans under the weight of Heifetz, Menuhin, Kennedy, Hahn, Mutter. Take your pick, they are all there, and most of them are good. So the first question a critic has to ask about yet another entry is the blunt one: why does the world need this record. The answer has less to do with novelty than with temperament.

Guy Braunstein spent thirteen years as concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic. That job teaches a player things a solo career alone cannot — how to breathe with sixty other people, how to shape a phrase so the second desk of violas understands exactly where it’s going, how to listen. That training is all over this disc. He does not attack the Bruch. He inhabits it.

The G minor concerto has always been a slightly awkward customer formally. Bruch himself worried it was really a fantasy rather than a concerto proper, and the improvisatory Vorspiel that opens it can tempt violinists into indulgence — that soupy, stop-and-smell-the-roses rubato that turns the first two movements into one long sigh. Braunstein and the director Ion Marin avoid this trap almost entirely. The Allegro moderato marking is honored; there’s real forward motion under the ad libitum solo entries, a sense that the music is going somewhere even when the violin is musing aloud. This has the salutary effect of making the Adagio, when it finally arrives, sound like an actual arrival rather than more of the same syrup. Too many recordings blur that distinction. Here you feel the seam, and the music is better for it.

The tone itself is not the biggest sound on record. This is not Perlman’s burnished opulence, nor Mutter’s steely projection. Braunstein’s timbre leans lean and singing, vibrato used as seasoning rather than sauce, and there’s an unforced nobility to his phrasing, particularly in the concerto’s lyrical second subject, that never tips into sentimentality. His virtuosity, when the Scottish Fantasy calls for it — and it calls for plenty, especially in the finale’s whirling double-stops — is never in doubt; he simply refuses to grandstand with it. The famous slow introduction, with its harp arpeggios evoking some misty Ossianic crag, unfolds with a kind of hushed intimacy that made me lean in rather than settle back.

The Bamberg orchestra plays with more than routine competence. Its full unwieldy name, Bamberger Symphoniker–Bayerische Staatsphilharmonie, tells its own postwar story of Sudeten German musicians resettled in Bavaria after 1945. Marin gets woodwind color that actually converses with the soloist rather than merely accompanying him. Listen to the oboe’s answering phrases in the Fantasy’s second movement, an unassuming Scherzo built on “Hey, the Dusty Miller,” and you hear real dialogue, not just polite deference.

The disc closes with Braunstein’s own arrangement of the F major Romance, op. 85, originally for viola, an instrument Bruch clearly loved more than history has rewarded him for. On violin it loses a little of its burnished, autumnal weight but gains agility, and Braunstein plays it as an epilogue, unhurried, content to let eight minutes pass without asking for applause.

Does this displace Heifetz’s flinty brilliance or Kennedy’s live-wire intensity at Anfield in 1988? No. Nor should it try. What it offers instead is a musician who has spent a career listening to others finally given the space to speak, and choosing to do so with modesty and taste. At full price that might once have been a hard sell. On musical grounds alone, it earns its place on the shelf.