AMERICAN DREAMS

IRÈNE ZANDEL/ HÄNSSLER CLASSIC

MAYBE YOU’LL START OUT JUST A FRACTION TOO FAST, LOSE CONTROL AND END UP ON A RUNAWAY TRAIN’ - FRANK PETER ZIMMERMANN

In the spring of 1941, Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu set sail for a new life in America. ¤e creeping Nazification of central Europe had turned many of its citizens into refugees, and although Martinu had left Czechoslovakia for Paris almost two decades earlier, his adoptive home was faring little better. ‘He.had sometimes struggled for success in Europe,’ says German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann, who has just recorded the composer’s two violin concertos, ‘but the US was another story.’ In the space of just a few years, Martinu received high-profile commissions for six symphonies, two TV operas and his Violin Concerto no.2, which was given its premiere in 1943 by Mischa Elman with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky.

During his years in France, Martinu was exposed to jazz and the charms of Les Six, in¨uences that gave his own scores an a£able, urbane quality and endeared them to audiences in New York City. For Zimmermann, however, the Second Violin Concerto is an evocation of the world the composer had left behind. ‘It’s so full of Romanticism,’ he says, ‘a.bit.like a 20th-century version of the Dvorák, with the same little cadenzas between the tutti statements in the first movement. ¤ere are touches of Bruch, and here or there a little Tchaikovsky. ¤ese concertos were Elman’s favourites, and Martinu’s singing lines would have been the perfect match for the famous sweetness of his sound.’ Numerous others, including Isaac Stern and Josef Suk, added the concerto to their repertoire in the years that followed.

Although it had to wait another 40 years for its first performance (also by Suk), Martinu wrote his Violin Concerto no.1 in 1933 for Samuel Dushkin, the American virtuoso whose playing inspired the angular, neo-Classical form of Stravinsky’s 1931 Concerto. ‘Martinu knew Stravinsky’s music very well,’ Zimmermann explains. ‘You can hear it in the textures and harmonies of the earlier concerto, not least in all the famous triple-stops.’ Unlike Stravinsky, however, Martinu did not require Dushkin’s help with the practicalities of the solo part. ‘For ten years from 1913, Martinu performed as a violinist with the.Czech Philharmonic and he was very sensitive to what the instrument could do. Having said that, getting all three strings to sound at once can make it feel like some kind of assault!’

Zimmermann’s partners on the disc are the Bamberg Symphony and Czech conductor Jakub Hruša. ‘Jakub has an incredible impact on the orchestra and really pushes them to their limits,’ he.says. Like Martinu’s later concerto, the.group also has its origins in the unprecedented movements of people that.occurred in the mid-20th century. ‘In 1946, the musicians of the German Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague - like.many Germans who remained in Czechoslovakia - were expelled from the country. A number of them settled in Bamberg, in Bavaria, which at that time didn’t have an orchestra of its own. You can still hear the orchestra’s heritage in its sound today. It’s silkier and more relaxed than older German orchestras like the Leipzig Gewandhaus or Berlin Philharmonic, for example.’

Martinu arrived in New York six months after Béla Bartók, who at last had felt able to leave Hungary for good following the death of his mother at the end of 1939. But while the roads of Martinu’s American dream appear to have been paved with gold, Bartók exchanged celebrity in Europe for hardship in the US. ‘He was su£ering from the blood disorder that would eventually kill him,’ Zimmermann says, ‘but he didn’t have the money to pay the American doctors. Yehudi Menuhin came to New York in 1944 and gave several successful performances of Bartók’s Violin Sonata no.1. After that, I.think Menuhin wanted to help him .nancially, and so he commissioned him to write the Solo Violin Sonata.’ .e work follows Martinu’s concertos on Zimmermann’s new recording, and was inspired by the form of Bach’s Solo Violin Sonata no.3, which Bartók heard Menuhin perform on the same US tour.

Frank Peter Zimmermann performs Martinü’s First Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonie conducted by Jakub Hrüsa in October 2018

STEPHAN RABOLD

‘I was too scared to touch it until recently,’ says Zimmermann, who has more than 50 discs to his name, including recordings of some of the most challenging music in the repertoire. ‘It’s the greatest solo violin work written in the 20th century,’ he continues, ‘but it’s also the kind of thing that requires you to invest a couple of hundred hours to get anywhere close, from a technical perspective, to a decent performance. Bartók knew the violin very well but I.get the feeling he wrote the Solo Sonata at the piano, as it absolutely reaches the outer edge of what is possible.’ Although the fruits of Bartók’s brief ‘American’ period, including the Concerto for Orchestra and Piano Concerto no.3, are some of his most familiar large-scale works, their audience appeal for some comes at the expense of their originality. ‘.ere’s absolutely no sense of that in the Solo Sonata,’ counters Zimmermann. ‘It’s.unbelievably dense, like granite. .e sound world reminds me of his crazy earlier pieces like Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.’

According to Zimmermann, the Solo Sonata is so di.cult that a technically perfect performance is not always possible. ‘You never know!’ he says. ‘Maybe you’ll start out just a fraction too fast, lose control and end up on a runaway train. On the other hand, a.performance like that is only going to increase the level of excitement in the hall. Bringing across that kind of drama is always a challenge on a recording, though. Whether or not you’re playing live, you need to keep a cool head without losing the fire - the peppercorn that makes the Hungarian sound. If you listen to a great Hungarian player, someone like Joseph Szigeti, that’s exactly what they do.’

Towards the end of his life, Martinu confessed to a friend that the fact US audiences preferred his music to Bartók’s made him ‘very, very unhappy’. The way the courses of the composers’ careers reversed direction in America must have been embarrassing for the younger Martinu, Zimmermann suggests. ‘His music is very entertaining, and I love to play it, but he would have known that Bartók’s was on another level,’ he says. ‘For me, Bartók is like Beethoven. Neither made any compromises, and it took a long time for performers to understand properly and get to grips with their music. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century, after all, that players’ technique became equal to Beethoven. Only once we can see their works from a great height, like an eagle soaring above them, are we able to recognise their true worth.’

WORKS Martinü Violin Concertos nos.l and 2 Bartök Sonata for Solo Violin ARTISTS Frank Peter Zimmermann (vn) Bamberg Symphony/Jakub Hrüsa RECORDING VENUES Martinü: Konzerthalle Bamberg (Joseph-Keilberth-Saal), Germany; Bartök: Siemens Villa, Berlin, Germany RECORDING DATES Martinü: 27 0ctober2018 (Concerto no.l), 4-5 October 2019 (Concerto no. Bartök: September 2019 and February 2020 CATALOGUE NO BIS BIS2457 RELEASE DATE 27 November 2020