Wieniawski, Conus & Vieuxtemps – Soo-Hyun Park

A young violinist announcing herself on disc has to solve a peculiar problem: what to play that says both “listen to my artistry” and “listen to my mind.” Soo-Hyun Park has chosen wisely, and a little perversely, pairing two staples of the salon-virtuoso tradition with a third work that almost nobody outside the Heifetz cult has bothered to champion.

The Wieniawski Violin Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor, op. 14, is a young man’s piece written by an actual young man — seventeen, unbelievably, when he set it down, still trailing the perfume of the Paris Conservatoire and Lipinski’s old-fashioned bravura style. It is not a subtle piece. It does not want to be. Park attacks the opening movement with a rhythmic snap that suggests she understands this, and her intonation in the upper register stays true even when the writing turns treacherous around the double-stops. The central Preghiera, marked to be played “quasi religioso,” gets from her a burnished, covered tone, not the icy purity some brittle-toned violinists impose on it; there’s vibrato here that breathes rather than shimmers. I found myself thinking of Michael Rabin, whose ghost hovers over this concerto the way Heifetz’s hovers over the Conus. Park doesn’t have Rabin’s dangerous, live-wire abandon — few ever have — but she brings her own kind of controlled heat to the finale, a Rondo that can sound like empty pyrotechnics in lesser hands and here sounds, at least, purposeful.

Gil Shaham’s DG recording remains a touchstone for sheer tonal glamour, and Perlman’s earlier EMI account has an unforced nobility that’s hard to unseat. Vadim Brodsky, on the small Arts Music label, is worth tracking down too, though good luck finding it. Park doesn’t topple any of these. But she’s already, on this evidence, in more interesting company than her relative fame would suggest — more assured, more daring, than Charlie Siem’s recent version, which for all its polish felt curiously safe.

Then there’s the Conus.

Julius Conus wrote essentially one piece anybody remembers, this single-movement “Violin Concerto ”in E minor from 1896, written in the shadow of Tchaikovsky, whom he knew, and under the spell of Franck’s cyclic procedures, filtered through a distinctly Russian melodic sweetness. Heifetz adopted it as a signature encore-sized concerto — it clocks in under twenty-five minutes — and his 1952 recording, tucked into volume 24 of the RCA/Sony complete edition, remains a demonstration of what unwavering, hypnotic tonal intensity can do to a fairly conventional structure. Perlman recorded it too, with somewhat more Romantic sweep and less steel. Kreisler played it in recital but, maddeningly, never let it near a studio microphone.

Park’s account is smaller-scaled, unhurried, patient with the work’s Lisztian sectional architecture rather than trying to weld it into false symphonic unity. The Adagio interlude is the highlight of the whole disc, frankly — her tone thins to a thread and then blooms again with real feeling, unforced rubato, the kind of phrasing that suggests she’s lived with this music rather than crammed it. One complaint: the engineers have placed the microphone close enough that you hear her breathe, sniff, even shift her feet occasionally. Intimate, yes. Also a little too intimate.

Vieuxtemps’s Fantasia appassionata in G minor, op. 35, closes things out, and it’s the piece here I suspect most listeners will find newest. Oddly neglected on disc — Ricci’s version with piano, back in the 1990s, was something of an outlier for decades — it unfolds in a loose sonata-adjacent shape that resists easy concert programming, twenty minutes being an awkward orphan of a duration, too long for an encore, too slight to anchor a program. There are pre-echoes of Bruch scattered through its lyrical stretches, and moments where Vieuxtemps lets structural logic take precedence over mere display. Park plays it with real ardor, finding the seams between rhetoric and song, and Nicholas Milton draws playing of unexpected refinement from the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz — this is not an orchestra you’d necessarily expect to sound so alert to color, but the winds in particular have real character.

Milton’s accompaniment throughout deserves more than a passing nod: sensitive to Park’s rubato, never merely following, occasionally leading. The whole disc has been recorded with warmth and presence, sniffs notwithstanding.

Is this an essential Wieniawski, an essential Conus? No — Heifetz still owns the latter outright. But as a calling card, this is a genuinely persuasive debut. I’ll be curious to hear where she goes next.