Szymanowski: Violin Concerto No. 1, Nicola Benedetti, violin

Chief among the reasons to welcome Nicola Benedetti’s début recording is for the profile that it will bring to Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto, a beautiful and strangely neglected work. (The performance that she gave of it at the BBC Young Musician of the Year final in the Usher Hall the year before was only the second time the reviewer had heard it live.) It was a shrewd choice of concerto for her: it doesn’t have the ghosts of famous interpretations hanging around it, and its ripe romanticism will always have wide audience appeal.

Benedetti is admirably secure throughout the work’s many high-lying passages, and sounds more spontaneous than she did in the Young Musician final, where her playing was very beautiful but not especially communicative. Her choice of conductor, Daniel Harding, may well have been a factor in the extra freedom and warmth of her performance, he encourages the LSO into often febrile playing, with gloriously calorific climaxes, and DG’s reportage is pleasingly opulent.

Benedetti’s chosen fill-ups, by Saint-Saëns, Chausson, Massenet, Brahms and Tavener, don’t in all honesty have much to do with Szymanowski (whose natural bedfellows are Scriabin and early Stravinsky), but they let her show off her technique in Saint-Saëns’s Havanaise, and Chausson’s lovely Poème is never unwelcome. DG’s liner notes are pitched squarely at introducing a young artist to as wide a public as possible.

About the concerto

Szymanowski wrote the concerto remarkably fast for a work of such intricacy, twelve days in the autumn of 1916, at a friend’s estate in what’s now Ukraine, with close technical input throughout from the violinist Paweł Kochański, who went on to write the concerto’s own cadenza and remained closely associated with the piece for the rest of his career. Real-world events then delayed its first performance for six years: the Bolshevik Revolution and the tail end of the First World War meant it wasn’t premiered until November 1922 in Warsaw, with Kochański himself giving the American premiere two years after that at Carnegie Hall. The result, a single continuous movement built more like a symphonic poem with solo violin than a conventional three-movement concerto, is often cited as one of the first genuinely modern violin concertos, which is exactly the kind of piece that needs an advocate willing to record it rather than the standard repertoire.