Béla BARTÓK (1881-1945)
Violin Concerto No. 2 (1938) [38:57]
Peter EÖTVÖS (b. 1944)
Seven (2006) [22:58]
György LIGETI (1923-2006)
Violin Concerto (1990, rev. 1992) [27:47]
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Peter Eötvös (Bartók, Eötvös)
Ensemble Modern/Peter Eötvös (Ligeti)
rec. Hessische Rundfunk – Sendesaal, Frankfurt, Germany, October 2011 (Ligeti), July 2012 (Bartók, Eötvös)
NAÏVE V 5285 [62:06 + 27:47]
Patricia Kopatchinskaja does not ease you in. From the first measures of the Bartók Violin Concerto No. 2, she is already at the edge — not the edge of control, but the edge of something older and rawer than the concert hall usually tolerates. The portamento she applies to the opening theme will startle listeners weaned on the cool, structurally immaculate Bartók of the standard discography. It sounds, frankly, like music played at a village crossroads at midnight. Whether that is an offense or a revelation depends entirely on what you believe Bartók was after.
He was, after all, a man who spent years with a wax cylinder recorder in the Hungarian and Romanian countryside, kneeling beside peasant singers and fiddlers. The concerto he completed in 1938 — written originally for Zoltán Székely, who then sat on it for two years while the world caught fire — carries that field-recording grit beneath its symphonic surface. Most violinists sand that grit away. Kopatchinskaja does not.
Which is not to say she plays it as folk music. The architecture stands. The variation form of the first movement — each return of the theme a kind of philosophical argument with itself — is fully rendered. And in the second movement she does something unexpected: she strips the vibrato nearly away, playing with a lean, almost Baroque transparency that makes the lyrical melody sound both intimate and exposed. The contrast with her extravagance elsewhere is striking, maybe slightly calculated, but effective.
Peter Eötvös — himself a Hungarian, himself a student of the traditions these works grow out of — is not merely accompanying. The orchestra breathes with the soloist, anticipates her, occasionally pushes back. This is a real conversation.
Still. I would not send a newcomer to this album. For someone hearing the Bartók for the first time, Kyung-Wha Chung’s account with Simon Rattle on EMI remains the saner entry point — warmer, more conventionally exquisite, less willfully strange. And if you want to understand what Bartók himself might have preferred, there is strong evidence in the original version of the concerto, with its brassy, defiant conclusion rather than the softened ending Székely requested. Christian Tetzlaff on Virgin Classics and Viktoria Mullova on Philips have both recorded that original version compellingly. I confess I prefer it — the brass ending has a kind of bitter honesty that suits the moment of composition, 1938 being no time for lyrical consolation.
But for sheer excitement, for the sensation that this music has never been played before and might never be played again quite this way? Kopatchinskaja is something else.
The Ligeti Violin Concerto is where any reservations dissolve entirely. This is the right pairing — not just programmatically but temperamentally. Ligeti finished the concerto in 1992, near the end of his long, restless career, and it has the quality of a man sorting through his own attic: the ocarinas and slide whistles summoned from some remembered folk ceremony, the microtonally tuned strings creating harmonic clouds that seem to exist slightly outside Western tuning altogether, and underneath it all the melodic material that Ligeti had been carrying since the early Musica ricercata, those compressed piano pieces from the early 1950s written under the noses of the Soviet censors. The melody at the heart of the second movement comes directly from that source — or from the wind quintet arrangement, the Six Bagatelles — and hearing it here, after everything the concerto has already thrown at you, is unexpectedly moving. A tune that once had to hide is finally allowed to sing.
Kopatchinskaja has said publicly that she considers the Ligeti the greatest violin concerto written after Beethoven. That is a large claim — it leaves the Brahms, the Berg, and the Bartók standing in the hallway — and I would not quite go there myself. But I understand the impulse. The concerto does something the others cannot: it holds irony and grief simultaneously without letting either cancel the other out. The first movement’s savage energy, the fourth movement’s spectral lullaby, the finale’s eruption — these are not effects. They are arguments.
Kopatchinskaja plays this music as if she wrote it. Her intonation in the microtonal passages is not merely accurate; it is expressive in the way that bent notes in blues playing are expressive — these are not wrong notes, they are the only notes. Eötvös, who studied with Stockhausen and spent decades at the cutting edge of European new music, conducts the orchestral textures with absolute clarity. Nothing is muddy. The slide whistles actually sound like slide whistles rather than a vague orchestral joke. The engineering is immediate and present in a way that serves this music especially well.
The disc also includes a concerto receiving its recorded premiere — a work I am less equipped to assess without score in hand, though Kopatchinskaja dispatches it with the same fearlessness she brings to everything else.
This is an indispensable Ligeti, a provocative and genuinely exciting Bartók, and a disc that reminds you — in case the concert hall had made you forget — that the violin is a wild instrument, not a tame one.
