Dvorák and Bruch Violin Concertos – Julia Fischer

There’s a moment about four minutes into the first movement of the Dvořák where the soloist has to float above pizzicato strings and let the melody just… breathe. Kreisler could do it. So could Suk, who grew up practically inside this piece, having married into the Dvořák family and absorbed the Bohemian inflections the way the rest of us absorb our native tongue. Julia Fischer, on this Zurich release, plays the passage cleanly, in tune, with a silvery evenness of tone that would make most conservatory juries weep with joy. But she doesn’t quite let it breathe. There’s a difference.

This is a concerto that took decades to earn its place in the repertoire, and even now it lives a slightly precarious existence next to the Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos that violin students cut their teeth on. Joachim, to whom Dvořák sent the score in 1879 hoping for the same imprimatur he’d given Brahms’s concerto two years earlier, never quite got around to performing it — some say he found the structure unconventional, the finale’s furiant rhythms resistant to the kind of grand formal argument he preferred. He tinkered, he equivocated, and the premiere went instead to František Ondříček in Prague in 1883. The concerto has carried a whiff of the unresolved ever since: gorgeous invention, slightly awkward architecture, a slow movement of heartbreaking simplicity bookended by outer movements that don’t always know quite what to do with themselves formally.

Fischer’s account has real virtues. Her sound is gleaming, focused, never scratchy even under pressure, and her technical command is superb, almost frightening: this is a violinist who can execute Dvořák’s double-stops and rapid figurations in the finale without ever seeming to break a sweat. In the last movement’s dumka-like episodes she finds an appealing lightness, a dancing quality in the bow arm that suggests she’s spent real time with Czech folk idiom, or at least with recordings of those who have.

But Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich do her few favors. The sound engineers have given the lower strings an unusually thick, almost engorged presence — cellos and basses sit low and heavy in the mix, more suited to a Bruckner symphony than to music that wants Slavic lift and rhythmic elasticity. Winds poke through with odd prominence in the first movement, as though someone in the control room decided the oboe needed to make a special case for itself. The orchestral playing sounds correct but generic, going through the motions rather than living inside the idiom. Where is the give-and-take, the rhythmic flexibility that lets a melody hesitate for a heartbeat before resolving? Talich had it, decades ago, with the Czech Philharmonic. Kubelík had it. Belohlávek, more recently, understood in his bones how the accents should fall. Zinman, for all his intelligence as a maestro elsewhere — his Beethoven cycle remains a genuine achievement — sounds here like a tourist reading a phrasebook. Competent, correct, unmoved.

The Bruch that follows is, frankly, a strange programming choice at this stage in the catalog’s life. Yes, both concertos passed under Joachim’s editorial pencil; yes, record companies love the pairing because it fits handily onto a single disc and appeals to violin-competition nostalgia. But do we need another G minor Bruch, however well played? Fischer brings poise and a certain aristocratic reserve to it — the “Adagio” sings with real feeling, more consistently than the Dvořák slow movement manages, oddly enough, perhaps because the orchestra seems more at home in Bruch’s Mendelssohnian sound-world than in Dvořák’s more idiosyncratic one. Still, I’d have welcomed almost anything else: the Romance in F minor, op. 11, would have made a lovely bridge; Suk’s Fantasie, or one of the underplayed Foerster concertos, might have said something the marketplace hasn’t heard in a while.

Against the field — Suk’s smoky wisdom, Perlman’s opulence with Barenboim, the young Midori’s fire, or more recently Frank Peter Zimmermann’s superbly idiomatic version with Järvi — Fischer’s account registers as accomplished but oddly provisional, a fine violinist not yet fully persuaded by her own conductor. Worth hearing for her playing. Not, in the end, a version to displace the classics.