Molique Violin Concertos 3 and 6 – Anton Steck

Names drop out of the repertory for reasons that have nothing to do with quality, and Bernhard Molique is proof of the axiom. Here was a violinist good enough to lead the Stuttgart orchestra as a teenager, respected enough to be courted by London’s Philharmonic Society, and then — nothing. A footnote in the encyclopedias, a line in the Spohr biographies, a name violin students encounter only if they go digging through old editions at the back of a conservatory library. The digging, on this disc, has been done for us.

The Third Concerto opens with a gesture that means business — hammered orchestral chords, the kind of rhetorical throat-clearing Beethoven patented and every violin concerto composer after him felt obliged to imitate, or resist, or both. Molique does both. He invokes the master and then wanders off into something closer to Sturm und Drang restlessness, unpredictable in its harmonic footing, hungry for effect. You hear why Joachim — Joachim! the man who effectively became the German violin tradition for the second half of the nineteenth century — thought this piece worth his time before he settled into the Brahms and the Beethoven for good. There is real substance under the fireworks.

And fireworks there are. Molique wrote for himself, which means he wrote for a player unafraid of thin air on the fingerboard — the passages sit high, the double-stops arrive unannounced, the bowing patterns demand a wrist of unusual suppleness. Anton Steck, playing what the booklet tells us is a gut-strung setup with Christoph Spering’s period band Concerto Köln… no, La Stagione — I misremember, it is Larpa festante here — meets these demands without apparent strain, though “without apparent strain” is not quite the same as effortless. There’s a slight scratchiness to the attack in the upper register in places, an occasional intonation smudge that a modern-steel virtuoso would sand away. I rather liked it. It sounds like a violinist, not a machine, and it sounds like the 1840s rather than a Heifetz remake.

The slow movement of the Third is where the disc earns its keep. Molique’s teacher of record was Pietro Rovelli, not Spohr, whatever the family tree suggests — and the Italian lineage shows. This is a movement soaked in bel canto, portamento sliding under the melodic line like rosin dust catching afternoon light, phrases arching and falling with the shape of an aria rather than an instrumental paragraph. Steck understands this. He leans into the portamento rather than sanitizing it, and the effect is unexpectedly moving — not virtuosity on display but a violinist singing, plain and simple. Then the finale arrives, a Rondo of disarming lightness, and Molique hands the bassoon some grinning, faintly absurd countermelodies that undercut all the high seriousness that came before. It’s a joke, and a good one.

The Sixth Concerto, from around 1847, is the more ambitious piece, though not necessarily the more successful. Molique enters the soloist almost immediately, à la Mendelssohn’s own E minor concerto of the same decade — the two works must have been in the air together, though there’s no evidence the composers knew of each other’s efforts. But where Mendelssohn’s opening theme floats free and songful, Molique gives us something odder: an insistent, dotted figure that can’t help recalling the opening bars of Mozart’s G minor symphony, layered against long-breathed bel canto phrases that seem to have wandered in from an entirely different opera house. It’s a strange fusion, not always comfortable, but interesting for exactly that reason. Nineteenth-century concerto composers rarely let their seams show this plainly, and there’s something almost modern in the disjunction.

Spering’s period-instrument band plays with lean textures and minimal vibrato, woodwinds piquant rather than blended, horns occasionally a little raw at the edges — this is a house style by now, familiar from a decade and more of German HIP recordings, and it suits Molique’s transitional idiom rather well. He belongs neither fully to the Beethovenian world nor to the coming age of Brahms and Bruch; he’s caught in between, and a band that resists the plush uniformity of a modern symphonic string section lets that in-betweenness breathe.

Is this an indispensable disc? No — I’d not tell you to abandon your Spohr Gesangsszene or your Rode Twenty-Fourth for it. But it is a genuinely valuable one, filling a gap that the standard discography has left embarrassingly empty, and Steck plays with enough conviction and idiomatic warmth to make the case for Molique as more than a curiosity. Worth your attention, and worth Molique finally getting some of his own back.