Echoes Of Time - Batiashvili, Salonen, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (2011)

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Echoes Of Time - Batiashvili, Salonen, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (2011)

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Lisa Batiashvili's debut album for Deutsche Grammophon "Echoes of Time" is a matter of the heart - an unusual, very individual and fascinating program by one of the most appreciated young soloists of our days. Lisa focuses her program on composers whose lives and work have been heavily influenced by the political happenings and oppressions in former Soviet Union - like Lisa herself, who went into German exile with her family during the political upheaval in Georgia in 1991.

Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich, Giya Kancheli, Arvo Pärt, Sergei Rachmaninov
Performer: Lisa Batiashvili, Hélène Grimaud
Conductor: Esa-Pekka Salonen
Orchestra/Ensemble: Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Reviews: Lisa Batiashvili’s debut recording for Deutsche Grammophon has as its center of gravity Dmitri Shostakovich’s by turns darkly brooding and bitingly sarcastic First Violin Concerto. For many years the work’s dedicatee and first performer, David Oistrakh, seemed to defend his primacy easily against all challengers. Critics would hold up recordings by violinists like Itzhak Perlman, Viktoria Mullova, and Maxim Vengerov, for example, as finally providing plausible alternatives, but Oistrakh’s recordings—at least his earlier ones with Evgeny Mravinsky or Dmitri Mitropoulos—still held sway. Batiashvili, who lived during her first decade under the Soviet regime and studied with Oistrakh’s pupil Mark Lubotsky, makes a claim to inheriting something of Oistrakh’s understanding of the concerto (of course, Leonid Kogan, who also gave insightful early performances, also experienced the conditions that gave Oistrakh his unique voice in the work, but he didn’t quite match the Master). Batiashvili and Esa-Pekka Salonen give an account of the first movement that’s arguably even darker and more dour than Oistrakh’s; they seem to bring the music to a near standstill on occasion, emphasizing its meditative gloom. She’s nearly as caustic as Oistrakh in the Scherzo; and though her articulation isn’t always so sharp as his (she’s no clone), she’s as fluent in the running passages and brings the movement to as rumble-tumble a conclusion. Salonen opens the third-movement passacaglia with an authority that Batiashvili matches in her subsequent entrance, which combines declamation with insinuating nuance (she plays the 1709 Engleman Stradivari). Toward the end of the movement, the engineers have sharply defined the theme’s pizzicato last statement. Oistrakh would begin the cadenza with deadpan seriousness and gradually grow animated—without, however, ever growing correspondingly warmer. Batiashvili sounds a bit moister (listeners may be surprised by the amount of reverberation if they go directly to the cadenza without listening to the preceding movements) in the passages after the very opening, but her reading resembles his—still without sounding like a copy, or worse, a pastiche. At times, she’s more leisurely in passages that Oistrakh dispatched in a seeming perfunctory rush, although nothing about his playing ever seemed really perfunctory in this work. And she rises to a dryly kinetic conclusion similar to his. Supposedly, Shostakovich had originally intended the violin to lead into the finale, but Oistrakh begged for a merciful respite after the gigantic cadenza. Some otherwise high-powered performances, such as those by Oistrakh, actually (perhaps as a result) make the orchestral statement of the Burlesque’s theme sound anticlimactic. Salonen and the orchestra (and the engineers, in collaboration) seem to have rectified this deficiency, and both soloist and orchestra maintain the finale’s momentum to the end. Altogether, their version of the concerto seems competitive with any, including Oistrakh’s, and the recorded sound, from the Munich Herkulessaal in May 2010, should give them a strong edge for those who insist on up-to-date digital fidelity.

Giya Kancheli’s V & V for violin and taped voice with string orchestra provides a change of atmosphere, drawing many of the poisons that might remain from Shostakovich’s concerto. Here too, as in the first movement of Shostakovich’s concerto, time seems to stand still, but in a more serene and less menacing way. Batiashvili’s father, Tamas, arranged Shostakovich’s Lyrical Waltz, a genial confection from Seven Dolls’ Dances, for violin and string orchestra. In her reading, the violinist demonstrates an almost Kreislerian combination of rhythmic incisiveness, flexibility, and ardor.

In the last two numbers on the program, Batiashvili collaborates with lycophile pianist Hélène Grimaud. The first of these, Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt, presents an opportunity, somewhat like that offered in Kancheli’s work, to limn a static expressivity of great sensitivity, requiring exceptional tonal control. The instrumentalists collaborate in creating a timelessness that isn’t the result of lethargy, focusing their attention and the listener’s on each individual moment. Batiashvili displays an even greater tonal pliability, in addition to heartfelt throbbing, in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s popular Vocalise, which serves as a kind of encore.

Altogether a captivating label debut, Batiashvili’s and her partners’ performances provide more than an hour of riveting listening. Strongly recommended.