Glazunov and Schoeck Violin Concertos – Hanslip

Somewhere in the twentieth century’s back rooms, Othmar Schoeck waits patiently to be discovered, and every decade or so a violinist comes along to make the case. Chloë Hanslip is the latest, and hers is a persuasive one.

Schoeck wrote songs — hundreds of them, exquisite settings of Lenau and Eichendorff and Meyer that put him, at his best, in the company of Wolf. The orchestral catalog is thin by comparison, almost apologetic. But the Concerto quasi una fantasia in B flat major, op. 21, composed in 1912 under the spell (a real spell, the biographical record suggests something close to infatuation) of Stefi Geyer — the same violinist who inspired Bartók’s first concerto and turned down Busoni — is no apology. It runs over half an hour, unfolds in a continuous arc rather than tidy sonata boxes, and asks the soloist to sing almost without pause. This is not a piece interested in fireworks. It wants breath, line, the long Romantic sentence stretched to its limit and then some.

Hanslip understands this instinctively. Her tone here is silvery rather than plush. She doesn’t force the instrument into Straussian richness, and rightly so, because Schoeck’s orchestration — lean, translucent, occasionally clouded by darker string writing in the second movement — doesn’t want a soloist wallowing. She floats above it. The first movement’s long paragraphs of melody unspool with an unhurried naturalness that never slackens into aimlessness, no mean trick in music this discursive. Around the seven-minute mark of the slow movement there’s a passage, almost a premonition, that reappears transformed in the finale. Hanslip and Vedernikov shape this connective tissue with real intelligence, so the piece’s loose-limbed structure feels inevitable rather than merely permissive.

The finale is the concerto’s one structural puzzle. It begins as a dance, genuinely winning, tinged with a rustic energy that briefly suggests Schoeck had been listening to Dvořák. But the composer keeps interrupting himself with reflective interludes too luminous to cut and too frequent to ignore. The dance never quite reclaims the field. Whether this is a flaw or simply Schoeck’s temperament — he was, by every account, a man who preferred nostalgia to resolution — is a question the interpretation doesn’t try to resolve. I think that’s the right call. Better to let the ambiguity stand than to force a triumphant close the music doesn’t want.

There is a 1947 release of this concerto with Stefi Geyer herself, Volkmar Andrae conducting, a document I’ve never managed to track down on disc, though I understand from colleagues who have heard it that it carries the frisson of the dedicatee’s own voice, worn but authoritative, like an old photograph that still somehow looks back at you. Hanslip cannot compete with that kind of history. She doesn’t try to. What she offers instead is polish, security of intonation across a very taxing tessitura, and an evident belief in the piece, which, given how rarely it gets programmed, may be the more valuable gift.

The Glazunov coupling occupies different, more familiar territory: the Violin Concerto in A minor, op. 82, a repertory staple since Heifetz first recorded it, and one that has attracted everyone from Milstein to Perlman to Hilary Hahn in the interim. Next to the Schoeck it sounds almost conventional in its symmetries, though “conventional” undersells its considerable charms. Glazunov, ever the craftsman, gives the soloist a cadenza that functions as a hinge between the work’s two large spans, and Hanslip dispatches it with clean double-stops and a sweetness of tone that recalls, at moments, the young Heifetz’s own poise, though without his steel. Her reading is warm rather than incisive. Some will want more bite in the outer sections, more of that dry, aristocratic wit Milstein brought to the piece. I missed it a little myself. But the “Méditation,” op. 32, is lovely, a small, perfumed thing, done with real tenderness, and the folk-inflected Mazurka-Oberek, less often encountered, has a rustic snap to it that Hanslip clearly enjoys.

Alexander Vedernikov and the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana provide sympathetic, unfussy support throughout. This is an ensemble that knows how to accompany without smothering, the winds especially alert in the Schoeck’s murkier passages. The engineering favors the soloist appropriately without burying orchestral detail; you can hear inner voices in the Schoeck that many performances blur.

Is this an essential Glazunov? No, the classic accounts remain classic for good reason. But as an entry point into a genuinely neglected masterpiece, the Schoeck concerto deserves your attention, and Hanslip’s advocacy is warm-hearted, technically assured, and entirely without condescension toward music history has been slow to embrace. Seek it out.