Baiba Skride/BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Violin Concertos
(Orfeo)
THIS new CD featuring the stunning Latvian violinist Baiba Skride with Thierry Fischer, outgoing principal conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (to be succeeded by Thomas Sondergard), does more than it says on the box. There is a scorching performance by Skride of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto, full of wit, mischief and a chunky neo-classical detachment with real bite in her delivery; and there are the unfamiliar delights of Frank Martin's Violin Concerto (which I've never heard before, but whose light-touch scoring is intriguing and engaging). But this cracking disc also includes real orchestral spectacle in Honegger's Pacific 231, a great evocation of heaving locomotion and Stravinsky's outrageous Circus Polka, written in 1942 for "50 elephants and an equal number of ballerinas" at Barnum and Bailey's Circus. It's a Two-Ton Tessie piece with an uproarious stampede on Schubert's Marche Militaire as its elephantine climax. Great stuff; a superb disc.
Michael Tumelty
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