Coleridge-Taylor and Dvořák Violin Concertos – Shaham

There’s a particular ache to the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto in G minor, op. 80, that has nothing to do with the notes on the page and everything to do with the composer’s biography: a Black British performer of extraordinary gifts, dead at thirty-seven from pneumonia he might have shaken off had he not been chronically overworked and underpaid, writing his one big concerto in the last months of his life for the American violinist Maud Powell. She never got to give the premiere. Coleridge-Taylor died before that happened, and the piece more or less vanished for decades. Only in the last twenty-five years or so has anyone paid it real attention. Gil Shaham’s new account with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra under Eric Jacobsen won’t settle the concerto’s reputation once and for all, but it argues its case about as persuasively as anyone has on record.

Shaham’s tone here is burnished rather than steely, which suits music that wants warmth more than heroics. The first movement is, frankly, a somewhat baggy piece of construction. Coleridge-Taylor’s structural instincts never quite matched his gift for a tune, and there are passages where the orchestra seems to be vamping while it waits for the soloist to find the next good idea. Every disc I know stumbles a bit here, Shaham’s included, and the timings across versions barely differ. What separates this account is the sheer sweetness of tone he brings to the lyrical material, and the way Jacobsen keeps the string textures translucent rather than sludgy. The Sandler Center’s acoustic gives the strings real bloom without letting the brass turn to mud.

The slow movement is where this rendition earns its keep. Shaham takes it a shade quicker than Philippe Graffin did on his Avie recording with the Johannesburg Philharmonic, and I think he’s right to. Graffin lingers, understandably — there’s a case for indulgence in this music — but a minute’s difference matters more than you’d expect; too much dwelling and the movement’s innocence tips into syrup. Shaham matches the pace favored by both Lorraine McAslan (Lyrita) and Anthony Marwood (Hyperion), and like them he resists sentimentality without going cold. There’s a hush in his pianissimo playing, a kind of held breath, that never curdles into preciousness. Whatever this movement is — a nocturne, a hymn, an elegy for something the composer never got to finish — Shaham understands it as intimate address rather than public statement.

The finale gets an injection of real energy. Striding, confident, faintly Elgarian in its rhythmic swagger. This is where Shaham’s decision-making impresses most, because he’s genuinely quick here, a good two minutes under McAslan. That tightening does the piece a favor. Coleridge-Taylor’s finale can sprawl if a soloist lets it, and Shaham’s brisker tempo gives it backbone without sacrificing the tune’s essential geniality. The balance between violin and orchestra throughout is one of the disc’s real successes. Jacobsen never lets the ensemble swamp the solo line, and the microphones — this was recorded in 2023 at the Sandler Center in Virginia Beach — capture a pleasing sense of physical space, ripe but not blurred.

Pairing this with the Dvořák Violin Concerto in A minor, op. 53, is shrewd programming, and not just because Coleridge-Taylor, himself a trained violinist, surely knew the older work intimately. The two concertos share a certain openhearted, folk-inflected lyricism, though Dvořák’s is the sturdier structure by some distance. Shaham’s Dvořák is idiomatic, songful, occasionally a touch careful in the outer movements where I’d have liked more abandon. This is a violinist who has recorded the piece before and knows exactly what he wants from it, which is not always the same thing as surprising you. The slow movement again is the highlight, phrased with unhurried tenderness.

Curtis Stewart’s The Famous People: F Harper rounds out the program, a curious and worthwhile bit of contemporary curatorial thinking that connects Coleridge-Taylor’s legacy to a living Black composer-performer’s voice. Brief, exploratory, not quite of a piece with the concertos around it. Not meant to be.

Does this displace Marwood’s Hyperion disc, with its shrewd Somervell pairing, or McAslan’s pioneering Lyrita account? Not entirely. Each still has something to offer, and Graffin’s Avie remains a lovely, unhurried alternative. But Shaham brings a starrier artistry and a more purposeful sense of pacing than either predecessor, and the engineering here is superior to all of them. For listeners wanting a single disc that makes the strongest possible case for this still-underrated concerto, this is now where I’d point them first.