Britten’s Violin Concerto on DSO Replay

Violinist Augustin Hadelich and conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste preparing to take their bows at the conclusion of Britten’s violin concerto (screen shot from the video being discussed)

After having been away from the DSO Reply Web site for over a month, I was prompted to return, once again by virtue of electronic mail from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). This time my attention was drawn to a performance that has been in the archives for over two years. The music being performed was Benjamin Britten’s Opus 15 violin concerto featuring Augustin Hadelich as soloist with Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducting. Hadelich has been a frequent visitor to San Francisco; but, to the best of my knowledge, this was my first encounter with Saraste on a podium. Unless I am mistaken, I have listened to this concerto only once in concert; and that was in October of 2014 when Isabelle Faust was the soloist with the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of Stéphane Denève.

The program book for that concert observed that Britten’s concerto, which he composed between 1938 and 1939, had been influenced by the Spanish Civil War. While Britten was a pacifist, he had friends who had traveled to Spain to fight for the Republicans. The war had been going on for about two years when he began work on the concerto, but the impact of the war registered when it concluded early in 1939. Francisco Franco’s Fascists had prevailed over the Republicans, suggesting that the concerto began to emerge as a sort of “war requiem” (an epithet to which Britten would return in 1961). Britten may also have been influenced by Alban Berg’s violin concerto and its depiction of the tragic death of Manon Gropius (daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler and stepdaughter of Franz Werfel) at the age of eighteen.

To be fair, however, there was little explicit in the approaches to performance by either Hadelich or Saraste to suggest that this music was “programmatic.” More important was the emphasis on motifs encountered early in the concerto that would thread their way through all three of the concerto’s movements. Furthermore, the last of those movements was a passacaglia, explicitly structured around the return and embellishment of basic thematic content. However, if there is no explicit denotation, there is a strong sense of connotations of a dark rhetoric, which come to a poignant head in the cadenza that precedes the beginning of the passacaglia.

Neither Hadelich nor Saraste was in any way shy in leading the attentive listener down Britten’s dark paths. Indeed, there was something almost chillingly detached in Hadelich’s composure, suggesting that he was only the messenger acting without influence from the message. On the instrumental side, even though Britten himself recorded this concerto with the English Chamber Orchestra, there was a wide breadth of coloration coming from the diversity of the instrumental resources. For the most part the camera work kept up with informing the viewer of the instruments contributing to those different colors, while Hadelich himself served up his own colors through different bowing techniques.

The three movements of the concerto are played without interruptions, giving the concerto as a whole the overall sense of a continuous journey; and, considering the sophistication and emotional intensity of the score, it is more than a little disappointing that the opportunities to take that journey are so few and far between.