Dvořák Violin concerto

 Day 57

Dvořák Violin concerto in a minor op 53

Rachel Barton Pine

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Teddy Abrams

I listened to a fair amount of Dvořák when I was at school and university. I had several of the symphonies on LP and a friend of mine had some of the others so I think that I had heard all of the symphonies by the time I left school. I still have an affection for symphony no 1 - The Bells of Zlonice - though it is far too long for its material.

I've played symphonies 5-9 and the cello concerto and also the wind serenade. At university the opera group gave the first performance in the UK of Dmitrij - which was certainly one of the highlights of my time there.

Since then I have rather tempered my early enthusiasm for Dvořák. I think that the problem is that he himself struggled with two different aspects of his musical personality - there is the Czech composer characterised by the symphonic dances but also the serious Germanic composer of symphonies. Personally I think that his music is at its finest when he is not pretending to be Brahms - but that it because of all the major composers Brahms is the one whose music I find least interests me.

This violin concerto seems to suffer from the duality. Time and again one hears stretches of the Czech Dvořák, but then these become stifled by what seems to have been the underlying need to write in a more serious style. So in the end I felt the piece was neither one thing nor the others. The last movement was the most attractive, but even there is wandered off in places and I felt there was a lack of consistency in the style.

So although I was glad to hear the work and of course there were some beautiful passages this is not something which I can see myself returning to with any great enthusiasm. Of course like everything in this project judging a piece on a single hearing is hardly a fair way of coming to a considered view about its merits, but that is the whole point of what I am doing this year. Listening to new pieces and deciding what further exploration I want to make.