BBC Legends 3: Szeryng’s Mozart and Vivaldi

The eighteenth CD in the latest BBC Legends release is based entirely on a performance that took place on February 26, 1972 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. The featured artist was violinist Henryk Szeryng performing as both concerto soloist and conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra. The opening selection is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 216 (third) violin concerto. This is followed by the first four of the twelve concertos collected by Antonio Vivaldi as his Opus 8, entitled Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (the contest between harmony and invention). Those four concertos have a more familiar title of their own: The Four Seasons. The program concludes with an encore selection of the final Allegro movement from the eighth in Vivaldi’s Opus 3 collection of twelve concertos, entitled L'estro armonico (the harmonic inspiration). The concerto was scored for two violins in the key of A minor, and the second violin soloist was José Luis Garcia.

Szeryng had an extensive catalog of recordings covering an impressive breadth of music history. In writing about those recordings, I felt obliged to write:

It is also worth noting that Szeryng’s recordings of Bach and Mozart were made at a time before critics started to discuss seriously matters of historically-informed performance.

By 1972 audiences were becoming more familiar with the implications of historically-informed performance, but this BBC album suggests that Szeryng never really changed with the times, even when his Mozart recordings with Paul Sacher were made with a chamber orchestra. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of expressive interpretation in his approaches to both Mozart and Vivaldi, even if his expressiveness is the result of twentieth-century aesthetics, rather than those of earlier periods.