Mendelssohn Violin Works – A Hidden Gem Revealed

Start with the sonata. Trust me on this.

The disc is sequenced the other way around — the great Mendelssohn Violin Concerto leads, then the early D minor concerto, then the F minor Sonata — but if you listen in reverse order you’ll find yourself in the presence of something genuinely strange and stirring before the familiar masterpiece arrives to claim its due. That sonata begins with fifty seconds of unaccompanied violin, a bold rhetorical gesture for a teenager to attempt, and in those fifty seconds you can hear — if you listen hard — the ghost of Bach, whom Mendelssohn would later rescue from obscurity with his legendary revival of the St. Matthew Passion, and something else besides, something modal and slightly Eastern, a hint of klezmer maybe, or just the peculiar harmonic imagination of a prodigy who hadn’t yet learned what he wasn’t supposed to do.

After that extraordinary preamble, the sonata settles into its more decorous classical manners. The piano has most of the real work here, and Romain Descharmes gives it playing of considerable finesse — clean articulation, sensitive voicing, never pushing. Tianwa Yang plays with admirable restraint throughout, though she finds small moments to breathe personality into the line, particularly in that searching opening.

Then the D minor Concerto — Mendelssohn was thirteen when he wrote it — recorded in what sounds like a large church, the Sinfonia Finlandia providing a warm, reverberant cushion of sound. Yang shifts into a more openly Romantic mode here, and the effect is lovely. She floats the lyrical passages with a natural ease that makes you realize, not for the first time, what an exceptional artist she is.

Which brings me to the point.

Tianwa Yang is among the most gifted violinists to emerge in this century. Technical command? Absolute. There are any number of young players who can negotiate the fingerboard without incident, who never crack under pressure, who produce a gleaming, accurate sound night after night. What separates Yang from the considerable crowd is something harder to name and harder still to manufacture — a quality of musical intelligence, of emotional investment, of feeling for phrase and line that goes well beyond the merely brilliant. She doesn’t just play the notes. She inhabits them.

The E minor Concerto is phenomenally done. I’ll be direct: this release stands up against anything currently available, including some very distinguished company. To test that claim, I organized a blind listening exercise — three-minute excerpts bridging the end of the Andante and the opening of the finale — drawn from accounts by Heifetz (1959), Daniel Hope, Cho-Liang Lin, Anne-Sophie Mutter with Karajan, and Yang. Six listeners, no labels, rank them best to worst.

One voter put Yang last. Even after the results were announced, he held his ground — too clean, he said, too conventional, lacking a distinctive voice. The other five disagreed, sometimes vehemently. “Best played of the five.” “Supreme control of mastery, pacing and drive.” “Rhythms more articulated — lively without being rushed.” “Embellishments I didn’t expect to like, but they work.” One voter simply wrote: “What a show.”