Benjamin Schmid & Daniel Raiskin
             Double Concertos

* Benjamin: Romantic Fantasy for violin, viola, & orchestra
* Britten: Concerto for violin, viola, & orchestra
* Bruch: Concerto for violin, viola, & orchestra in e, op. 88

Benjamin Schmid (violin), Daniel Raiskin (viola)
Berlin Symphony Orchestra/Lior Shambadal
Arte Nova 74321 89826 2 Total time: 63:59

Summary for the Busy Executive: Mostly wonderful program; good performances.

 From at least Vivaldi on, one finds a good number of double concerti,
but not all that many for violin and viola.  The problem stems from
composers' attitudes toward the viola - an instrument that usually does
little more than fill in harmony and texture - as well as the viola's
range, which tends to bury it in the middle of things.  The combination
of violin and cello, for example, allows significant range overlap of
the two instruments as well as a wider range than violin and viola and
a more pronounced color contrast.  One doesn't normally think of the
viola as a powerful, individual orchestral voice, although one can readily
cite composers who have created great roles for the instrument: Shostakovich,
Hindemith, Walton, Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Rozsa among them.  I,
however, have always preferred the sound of a viola to that of a violin.
I once tried to write a string quartet that eliminated violins completely
- two violas and two cellos - before my professor made me revise it for
the standard combo in the name of greater color variation.  He was right,
but you can see the lengths I was willing to go.

None of the three works here can claim a place in standard rep.  Indeed,
the Britten Double Concerto was discovered only relatively recently,
in a kind of piano score with indications as to orchestration from the
composer himself.  Colin Matthews realized the score and claims that
Britten's instructions were so complete that the score now is "virtually
100 percent Britten." Who knows?  It certainly is a marvelous piece of
music and a great addition to the Britten catalogue.  He wrote it at 19,
but a composer of any age should have been proud to have produced it.
Schmid and Raiskin (who gave the German premiere) compete with Kremer,
Bashmet, and Nagano on Erato 3984 25502-2 (see a detailed review at
www.classical.net/music/recs/reviews/e/era25502a.html).  Schmid and
Raiskin's main virtue is their musical sensitivity to one another.  In
this, they are the equals of Kremer and Bashmet.  Unfortunately, Shambadal
and the Berlin play way too crudely.  There's nothing out-and-out terrible
and if you knew only this recording, you'd probably be satisfied, but
compared to Nagano and the Halle, the reading is one-dimensional.  Nagano
gets the piece to breathe and move like a living creature.  Shambadal's
account has all the vivacity of concrete.

Australian-born Arthur Benjamin received his training and made his
career in England.  His music has fallen almost completely under the
radar.  His artistic voice speaks with many accents from piece to piece
- influenced by jazz, Caribbean music, Hindemith, Lambert, Stravinsky -
and the lack of a strong individual profile may have contributed to his
present obscurity.  Nevertheless, everything is very well made, and much
is beautiful.  The Romantic Fantasy (though not, as the liner notes
claim, written for or even premiered by them) came into relative prominence
through the efforts of Heifetz and Primrose, who made two recordings:
one in the late Thirties, shortly after Benjamin wrote the work, and one
in stereo in 1964 for RCA.  The LP, never, as far as I know, released
on compact disc, introduced me to the piece.  "Fantasy" implies an
improvisatory structure, but Benjamin builds very sturdily, from a very
small kit of ideas.  The structure also shows a master planner, who can
create convincing paragraphs and who has no trouble with unconventional
forms.  The Fantasy is in three, tightly-related continuous movements.
Anyone who knows the Mahler Fourth will feel the little hairs on the
back of his neck stand up at the opening horn call, whose notes repeat
a major motif in the song about the "heavenly life." In fact, Benjamin
got his theme from Arnold Bax, not Mahler.  Indeed, much of the piece
isn't Mahlerian at all.  If it reminds me of anything, it's the Barber
Violin Concerto, which comes slightly later, and I doubt that Barber had
heard Benjamin or vice versa at the time.  The similarities extend to
the harmonic palette and to certain features of orchestration, including
the somewhat unusual use of orchestral piano in both scores and a color
emphasis on double reeds.  If it doesn't reach the intensity of the
Barber, it nevertheless sings as beautifully.  The stereo Heifetz-Primrose
is probably a classic recording, but I find a bit too schmaltzy, too
concerned with the star power of the soloists (or at least one of the
soloists).  Schmid and Raiskin have the empathy, the weird radar of fine
chamber players.  They bring to the Fantasy great refinement.  Again,
however, the orchestra doesn't reach their level.

Max Bruch originally wrote his concerto for clarinet and viola.  He
arranged it for the present combo.  Commentators make a big deal of the
fact that Bruch composed this very Mendelssohnian work in 1911 and point
to the hostile modern environment for such a work as contributing to its
obscurity.  I've always found this kind of argument a little specious
(on both sides of the argument), since most people don't know and could
care less about when a composer wrote a work.  The valid question, as
always, is how good the work is in itself.  I happen to like a lot of
Bruch's music, but this piece fails to rouse my attention.  If the
concerto has one non-recycled idea in it, then I missed it.  The question
of performance thus becomes pretty much de trop - a shame, because all
the performers have a much firmer grasp on Bruch's idiom than on either
Benjamin's or Britten's.

The sound is a bit dead, but the interest of the program should make up
for it.

Steve Schwartz