Kubelík and Mendelssohn Violin Concertos – Šporcl

Some names survive as footnotes to their own fame. Jan Kubelík is one of them — remembered, if at all, as the impossibly gifted Czech boy wonder who stood alongside Ysaÿe and the young Kreisler in the front rank of pre-1914 fiddle gods, and who then vanished from that conversation. What actually happened is that he kept playing, kept composing, fathered a maestro son (Rafael) of real distinction, and wrote six violin concertos that almost nobody has heard. Pavel Šporcl has decided to do something about at least one of them.

The disc gives us the First Concerto, in C major, composed during the years 1915–20, when Kubelík — cut off from London and New York by the war, his touring life in ruins — retreated into composition. He surfaced in January 1917 to premiere it himself in Vienna, Oskar Nedbal conducting, and then let it disappear again. This album, made in the resonant, slightly cavernous acoustic of Smetana Hall, is its first commercial outing. That alone makes the disc worth attention. Whether the piece itself repays repeated listening is a separate question.

It doesn’t sound like a virtuoso’s calling card. You’d expect fireworks from a man contemporaries nicknamed the second Paganini. Instead Kubelík gives us a work that leans lyrical, almost operatic in its long-breathed melodic spans, with a whiff of Smetana’s tone poems in its harmonic language and its feel for orchestral color. The opening gesture is a brass fanfare, answered by an unaccompanied cadenza for the soloist — a device Kubelík liked enough to bring back later in the movement, and it works dramatically, even if you can hear the seams. Šporcl relishes the aerial, high-wire writing Kubelík gives the violin, spinning out the melodic lines with a tone that’s silvery rather than plush, never quite indulging in schmaltz even where the composer all but invites it.

The slow movement is the disc’s best argument for the piece: a rhapsodic, airborne thing, deftly turned, with a pirouetting lightness that Šporcl catches beautifully — light bow, minimal vibrato at the top of phrases, the sound almost evaporating before the orchestra catches him. The finale is high-spirited stuff, busy passagework, the percussion given real structural weight. Is it a great concerto? No. Is it a piece that deserved seventy years of silence? Also no. Tomáš Brauner and the Prague Symphony play as if they believe in it, which matters more than you’d think — half-hearted advocacy kills more forgotten scores than bad writing ever does.

Then, the Mendelssohn. Programming the Violin Concerto in E minor, op. 64 alongside a curio like this is a shrewd bit of marketing — give listeners their comfort food, then ask them to eat their vegetables — but it also invites unflattering comparison. Šporcl’s Mendelssohn is efficient, cleanly articulated, the first movement taken at a tempo that leaves little room to breathe. I missed the songfulness that violinists like Milstein, or more recently Isabelle Faust, bring to the slow movement’s long paragraphs; Šporcl’s version is well-schooled but a touch four-square, the phrasing correct rather than inhabited. It does its job without staking any particular claim on the work’s long recorded history — and against Heifetz, against Kreisler even in ancient shellac, that’s simply not enough.

Which brings us back to Kubelík, where the disc’s real value lies. Miroslav Vilímec, former concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic, recorded the concerto in piano reduction with his brother Vladislav at the keyboard for a Kubelík Society tribute disc — a release of real archival interest, not least because it also preserves Kubelík himself playing fragments of his Fourth Concerto in the 1920s, his own violin caught on primitive equipment, ghostly and fascinating. Šporcl thanks Vilímec and the Society in his notes.

The engineering here is warm, well-balanced, the violin never allowed to swamp the winds. If Šporcl is contemplating all six Kubelík concertos — and I hope he is — this is a promising start rather than a triumphant one. Recommended, with real enthusiasm, for the Kubelík; recommended with reservations for the Mendelssohn that comes along for the ride.