Andris Nelsons and Guy Braunstein with works by Brahms and Strauss
Brahms’s Violin Concerto impresses not with artistry, but with the marvellously delicate interplay between soloist and orchestra. Guy Braunstein and Andris Nelsons showed off the concerto’s charms in a performance that was both dynamic and without affectation. Its discreet virtuosity contrasts here with a work of almost unashamed self-confidence: Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.
It was Hans von Bülow, the one-time chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker who said that Johannes Brahms’s Violin Concerto is a “concerto against the violin” – simply because the soloist is given little opportunity for virtuoso showmanship. In this performance, the Berliner Philharmoniker, Guy Braunstein and conductor Andris Nelsons revealed the concerto’s obvious and hidden charms.
The solo part of the Violin Concerto is anything but easy to play. With the violin closely interwoven with the other instruments for long passages, the work can appear more like a symphony than a concerto. All the greater then is the effect when it confidently rises above its fellow instruments with its delicate lines, leaving all the large-scale orchestral force behind it. The violinist Guy Braunstein was 1st concertmaster with the Berliner Philharmoniker from 2000 until 2013, when he left the orchestra to concentrate on his solo career.
The second work of the evening, Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, complements Brahms’s Violin Concerto in two respects. Firstly, there is the triumphant gesture of this self-portrait – that is, after all, what it is – in direct contrast to the seriousness of the Brahms work. And secondly, in the third movement you can experience how an expansive violin solo develops unexpectedly from a symphonic poem, played here by Guy Braunstein’s fellow concertmaster, Daishin Kashimoto.
© 2012 Berlin Phil Media GmbH
Related interviews
Artists
Our recommendations
- Benefit concert “Together for humanity”
- Works by Dmitri Shostakovich and Arnold Schoenberg with Semyon Bychkov and Guy Braunstein
- Violins of Hope
- Sir Simon Rattle and the Orchestra Academy perform Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde”
- Andris Nelsons conducts Mozart, Wagner and Shostakovich
- Andris Nelsons and Barbara Hannigan