Renaud Capuçon, the 24 year-old French violinist,
nominated as New Talent of the Year 2000 by the French Victoires
de la Musique, is now an exclusive artist with Virgin Classics label,
and this debut album, looks, on the face of it, like a Beecham lollipops
album (though TB would never have tolerated a soloist to rival him),
but it is rather more sophisticated than that. Admittedly some of the
Saint-Saëns works are fireworks (Havanaise) and little more,
though refined ones at that (such as the Lisztian Danse macabre),
and Massenet’s sublime interlude is a silky balm to the nerves, particularly
in the hands of these two young men (Harding not being much older than
his soloist). They are evidently the moving lights behind this disc
and are clearly enjoying it all, and the photo of them in the CD booklet
shows an uncannily eerie similarity of likeness. Their unity of ensemble
throughout is impeccable thanks to Harding, at the head of his own German
orchestra in Bremen, who draws virile playing from his players.
Capuçon plays a 1721 Stradivarius which belonged
to none other than Kreisler, and his virtuosity is not to be denied.
Rather like the recent disc of Chloë Hanslip and the LSO review
(is this the new vogue?) the music is well chosen (though she went for
more of the salon music scenario) and provides the ear with tuneful
delights, for example Berlioz’s elegiac Reverie and caprice (written
for Kreutzer). The pseudo- Hungarian Tzigane which Ravel wrote
for Jelly d’Aranyi, is fiendishly difficult to play with its harmonics,
double-stops and left hand pizzicato all tossed off with consummate
artistry by this young man. This is the best music on the disc, and
the most interesting and challenging for the orchestra who duly rise
to the occasion. There is a kind of caustic wit, sardonic French humour
perhaps, to this work, taken up by Milhaud in his concoction of Brazilian
folk tunes and syncopated rhythms, normally a work for orchestra alone
but adapted in this version by the composer himself into a Chaplin-like
silent movie style. It is an uproariously funny piece, made the more
grotesque in this version by the scratchy fiddling, bad tuning and plain
wrong notes, and to top it all it is provided with another challenging
cadenza, but by Honegger. Great fun, but probably not for poor old Stradivarius;
this track alone will have him spinning in his grave.
Christopher Fifield
Renaud Capuçon (violin)