Steve Schwartz:

>For a very long time, listeners were more or less stuck with Britten's
>account with violinist Mark Lubotsky, one of the few failures in Britten's
>performances of his own music.  Now listeners actually have a choice to
>make.

Luckily for me, I have been profoundly satisfied with the Lubotsky/Britten
recording (paired with Richter/Britten for Britten's Piano Concerto)
since 1961, when it came out, while always wondering who the heck Lubotsky
was/is.  Now I am probably going to have to invest in these new performances
just to see if I can overcome early imprinting, and to find out what
changed in the "revised version" as compared with the 1939 version I
know.

Is anyone acquainted with the recording conducted by Vanska?  (And does
anyone share my intense irritation with Amazon.com's "advanced" search
engine, which seems designed to defeat person's search for a particular
item?)

My first attempt to supplement/replace a vinyl recording of Britten by
Britten was Previn's Spring Symphony, which disappointed me; as did my
purchase of Mordkovitch's recording of Shostakovich's Violin Concertos
(though the conducting by Jarvi may have had something to do with that)
so I may well retain my first attachment.

>Hickox and Mordkovitch discovered the concerto's links to the
>doomed Republican side of the Spanish Civil War.  In their hands, the
>first and last movements became a kind of elegy, separated by a bitter,
>acerbic scherzo.

This is interesting, particularly in light of Tom Eastwood's comment (on
the liner notes of the Britten/Britten recording that the Waltz in the
Piano Concerto echoed the Austrian Anschluss of 1938, around the time
the concerto was written.

>The Britten is such an odd duck of a work, it's hard to grasp
>architecturally and emotionally.

Not for me, though I am not so interested in a formal analysis.  It
caught me up at once.  It seems somewhat in the spirit of Prokofief's
violin concertos, though quite different in many respects.  The passage
for the violin way, way above the treble clef, accompanied by piccolos,
muted strings, and tuba, is something I have never heard the like of,
and one of the great moments in music.

Jim Tobin