Bernard Chasan >It took me a long time to appreciate Rochberg - he seemed to be merely >revisiting the past. The Naxos recordings of the Violin Concerto and >the Fifth Symphony gave the lie to that. Last year I reviewed the second-mentioned of these Naxos recordings (http://www.classical.net/music/recs/reviews/n/nxs59115b.html). Peter Grahame Woolf reviewed the Violin Concerto on Classical.net (http://www.classical.net/music/recs/reviews/n/nxs59129a.html); I missed that at the time (it was not posted to the list) and I am sorry to say I was oblivious to the importance and merits of that release, until now. When it first was performed, Rochberg's Violin Concerto made a huge splash, even in the mainstream media, which at that time paid more attention to classical music, because it reinforced the news that a leading avant-gardist had returned to tonality. Isaac Stern performed it 47 times between 1975 and 1977. I heard one of those performances, at Tanglewood in 1976. (Let me correct my earlier statement--in the review I cited--that this was later, because something depends on the date.) By the time Stern's recording appeared in 1979 Stern had persuaded Rochberg to agree to a cut of fourteen minutes from the score. After three years, and on the basis of a single hearing, I never noticed the difference. The painstaking restoration of that cut by Christopher Lyndon-Gee is part of the big news about this Naxos release. The other big news about the Naxos is that it sounds much, much better than the Columbia vinyl recording (M35149). Woolf mentioned that the Stern recording evidently never crossed the Atlantic to the U.K. where he was writing. I still have that recording (the cover illustration shows an amazingly youthful Andre Previn and George Rochberg, by the way--Stern doesn't look so old either) and I just made a one-on-one comparison. What surprises me--though this is probably a reason I have not listened to it lately--is that the vinyl recording sounds downright harsh, particularly the solo violin. This tends to make parts of the work seem to be harsh, in spite of the fact that much of it is ravishing. This is off-putting and disappointing. One reason why this particularly matters is that Rochberg's concerto is not entirely lyrical; it alternates between lyricism and sterner stuff (pun intended, I suppose) and the balance of those moods matters. Rochberg could be lyrical even with serial material (as in his Second Symphony) and he continued to use serial techniques sometimes, for expressive purposes, at times even in his later works. My own ears don't tell me whether he is using a tone row or simple dissonance because he doesn't go every which way with his intervals (unlike some composers I can't stand, frankly.) Instead, I simply hear passages that are more bracing than others. Indulge me if I see a parallel with a non-musical incident that delighted me at the time and which I still savor. Some time ago my wife and I were the first seated in a favorite little Italian restaurant one evening. Shortly thereafter four people sat down at a table nearby. A couple minutes later there was a loud crash, as a wine glass was knocked to the floor by one of them who had made a sweeping arm gesture. The owner, a lovely woman named Teresa, immediately went over with dustpan and brush, plus a pleasant low-key comment. The perpetrator--one cannot say offender--explained that he was "just being expressive!") I found the behavior of both as a lesson in life and, in context, I cherish the memory of the crash as a wonderful punctuation to the rest of the evening. More on the cuts Stern made: they were mostly in the fourth and fifth movements, which are played without pause. Stern's recorded time for both is listed as 18:37. The restored version runs 18:35 in the fourth movement alone (Intermezzo B), with the fifth (Epilogue) coming in at an additional 10:26. To my ears that is not a minute too long. Jim Tobin