Octo_Russ

Mendelssohn - Violin Concerto [Bell/ Norrington-Camerata Salzburg] 

Mendelssohn's perennial Violin Concerto again!, just counting my Blog entries for this work, it's now appeared 5 times in the past [each time by a different performer], and now here's Joshua Bell playing this work, this is another disc that i bought fairly recently, and now i've been able to dip my toes in this disc. 

Joshua Bell is now 43 and a household name as far as the violin goes, he was born in America, and he recorded this disc in 2000, he has already recorded the Mendelssohn work with Marriner [his debut disc in 1988], the front cover shot [photo by Timothy White], is really nice, very much a blue theme, nice pin sharp shot, with clever shadows.

One of the things that took me by surprise with this work, is that Bell uses his own cadenza in the first movement, Mendelssohn actually wrote out his own cadenza in full, and incorporated it into the work, so it's very strange / different for the music to dip into unknown territory when Bell does his solo cadenza, it's the first movement that i really loved, exciting and dazzling bravura, right from the very start, the violin comes in and announces itself as a virtuoso [0:05-1:01], nice clear and superb recording, Bell takes us into treble heaven, with a series of high tessitura whoops [4:55-5:20], the cadenza comes roughly halfway through the movement [7:10-8:48], and i must admit that i can't get used to Bell's own ideas here, they just sound out of place, even though his cadenza is certainly full of interesting ideas, towards the very end there's a speeding up into a nice bravura finale, and there's some exciting passage work [12:42-12:48], but it's that cadenza that just seems to break the flow of this usually very fluid movement.

Here's Shlomo Mintz playing the first movement on YouTube.