Engaging solo repertoire as The Red Violin yields up more musical delights

This is another incarnation of John Corigliano’s Red Violin music. First the film and the Chaconne for violin and orchestra derived from it (1997); then the Concerto (2003); and now the composer has extracted a set of caprices for solo violin.

These were originally written as studies and the actors, filmed playing the instrument, had to mime to them. Because of the demands of the film, reflecting the life of a violin at various times and places, the writing has a wider stylistic range than most contemporary works for solo violin.

Corigliano’s Sonata for Violin and Piano (1963) is an early piece with ingenious Stravinskian panache in the rapid writing and lyrical charm elsewhere of the kind which led to The Red Violin 35 years later. Quint and Wolfram make it sound just as impressive as Bell and Denk (Sony, 2/08).

Most of Virgil Thomson’s Portraits were for piano so it’s unusual to have three groups for violin, with and without piano. Thomson began with seven of the Eight Portraits for solo violin in 1928 and went on to produce about 150. He actually composed in front of the sitter like an artist sketching, and the results are delightfully spontaneous. There’s a “Tango Lullaby” for Mlle Alvarez de Toledo, who must have been quite a character; sketches of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, both so important in Thomson’s life; and composer colleagues like Henri Sauguet (see Virgil Thomson’s Musical Portraits by Anthony Tommasini – Pendragon Press – for full details).

Philippe Quint’s panache is stunning and this CD offers some of the most attractive music for solo violin in the entire repertoire.

-- Peter Dickinson, Gramophone [9/2008]