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A visceral immediacy that goes straight to the heart of the music: Isabelle Faust gives a compelling reading of Britten’s Violin Concerto with the Bavarian RSO

plenty of great ideas for his players to show their mettle but also their heart and individuality, and Wang opens plenty of windows in the texture for them to shine through. A couple of days before listening, I chanced on a radio broadcast of Earl Wild with the RPO and Horenstein (RCA, 10/80), which would surely be many listeners’ idea of a classic version. In all the above terms, Wang and Dudamel are streets ahead: admittedly not quite on a level with Janis/Kondrashin (Mercury, 12/62), whose fusion of rhetoric and vision is even more extraordinary, but arguably in the same league.

Curiously, No 1 is not placed first on the CD. That honour goes to the Second Concerto, which is where I began listening. Here I confess my heart sank a little as the famous opening chords took an age to crank up. Was this going to be a performance disfigured by attention-

seeking idiosyncrasy? Well, no, thank goodness. But it was a while before I could warm to it. One reason for that may not be any fault in the playing, which displays as much tigerish relish and idiomatic languor as in the First Concerto, but rather with a recorded balance that places the piano conspicuously to the fore. Given that clarity is one of Wang’s trump cards, the choice is understandable. Rachmaninov’s piano-writing teems with inventive detail that is frequently lost in the concert hall, or only preserved at the expense of taming the orchestra, and it would seem churlish to complain when that detail is brought out and savoured. Not only that, but some discreet boosting is justifiable – indeed routine – simply to compensate for what the eye tells the ear in live performance. My problem is that Rachmaninov’s orchestral writing is as structurally load‑bearing as it is ornamental, and even when that is not the case, its dialogue with the piano here goes for less than it might. When the orchestra can get a word in edgeways, as in the Second Concerto’s slow movement, the playing is of real distinction, caressed and cajoled into loving shapes by Dudamel. But in the embedded scherzo, where the piano should be consorting rather than dominating, there are places where the orchestra might as well have been miming. When piano and orchestra come separately to centre stage, as at the opening of the finale, Dudamel’s razorsharp phrasing and Wang’s athleticism alternate to thrilling effect. At such moments I willingly surrender to the sheer combustion generated. But another part of me has to acknowledge the critiques that sometimes come Wang’s way: that taking virtuoso warhorses by storm is well and gramophone.co.uk

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