THE POWER COUPLE

The concertos of Brahms and Busoni make a natural pairing on record but, as the violinist Francesca Dego explains to Peter Quantrill, the connection between them goes beyond the notes

Francesca Dego has been playing Brahms’s Violin Concerto since she was a teenager. With a little over 20 years’ experience, she feels now is a good time to take it into the studio, and in partnership with a like-minded conductor, Dalia Stasevska, to present ‘Brahms without the beard’. She does so, however, informed by the wisdom and insights of a famous bearded maestro, Roger Norrington, who worked with Dego on his own final recordings before his retirement in 2021.

Dego recalls her first encounter with Norrington as ‘a life-changing experience’. They played the Brahms together in Germany, and after their first meeting he sent her regular emails with new ideas: ‘What I loved was how he never stopped researching.’

Her own research has shown Dego how much performances of music by Brahms have slowed down in recent decades. Joseph Joachim was the concerto’s intended first soloist (in 1879) as well as Brahms’s friend, on and off, for decades, and he left tempo indications in his edition that most modern performers and listeners would find shockingly precipitate, such as q= 120 for the first movement. ‘We’re past the time,’ remarks Dego, ‘when teachers of the Russian school would tell us that metronome marks didn’t matter because the metronomes were faulty. As Norrington said to me, Brahms wasn’t playing Brahms “like Brahms” at the time. His inspiration would have been Beethoven or Mendelssohn.’

Perhaps the letter of the score is less important at this point than its implication, which is to think of the long and epic, quasi-symphonic first movement with a basic one-in-a-bar pulse, allowing all the more room for relaxation into its lyrical episodes. But, says Dego, ‘You have to know the rules to break them. If you haven’t read Joachim’s foreword to his edition, if you haven’t looked into all of this, then you’re not really entitled to take the tempo the way you want or change the piece however you like. In the end, it’s always about phrasing and shaping, and how to interpret what’s written on the page as performers of the time would have done within the style that came naturally to them.’ She explains, though, that placing the music in its context shouldn’t necessarily come from an academic mindset. ‘The academic approach is like walking on eggshells, because you’re afraid of doing the wrong thing.’ As a competition juror rather than participant, she now sees this anxiety in younger performers. ‘The more you can back your ideas with thought and musical reason, then the more convinced you’ll be and thus more convincing, I think, in any repertoire.’

DAVIDE CERATI

‘I KNEW I WANTED TO RECORD THE BUSONI AND HOW I WANTED IT TO SOUND – AND HOW I DIDN’T, WHICH IS SAFE’ – FRANCESCA DEGO

Looking at the score, we alight on bar 179 in the first movement, where the soloist plays a flowing stream of triplets against the winds softly elaborating the main theme. ‘So many recordings take the solo line out of context, with vibrato on every note. If you look at how Brahms articulates the woodwind lines, with separate slurs for each bar of the theme, it helps you to understand how to phrase the triplets. You can be incredibly expressive by underlining where the phrasing is going rather than revelling in your own decoration.’

On DG and now Chandos, Dego has accumulated an impressive catalogue, but she views the new album as a landmark in her career – not solely as a setting down of ‘her’ Brahms, but as a work of advocacy for the much less familiar concerto by Busoni (the album is the first recording of either concerto by an all-female duo). The year 2024 marks a century since the composer’s death in Berlin as a figure revered, misunderstood and embittered in roughly equal measure.

Francesca Dego at the recording sessions with Dalia Stasevska and the BBC Symphony Orchestra

ALEXANDER JAMES

As a violinist of Italian heritage with a philosophical (one might almost say Germanic) turn of mind, Dego is perhaps uniquely well placed to give Busoni a helping hand. ‘My mother’s family is German-Jewish, and they were all killed by the Nazis. Even taking historically informed performance out of the picture, some of the best Mozart interpreters of our time have been Italian – Claudio Abbado, Salvatore Accardo, Giuliano Carmignola. And there’s Mozart himself! Italy was one of the biggest influences on his writing. This connection has been lost to a degree but I do feel close to it. It’s a strange relationship that Italians have with themselves and with the rest of the world. They need to demonstrate that they can play Beethoven – I don’t know how to put it better than that!’

We return to Busoni, who himself referred to his Violin Sonata no.2 of 1898–1900 as an ‘Opus 1’, thus unhelpfully relegating reams of music written from childhood onwards (he was born in 1866) to the status of apprentice work. We can afford to be more generous, and it would take a stony heart, listening to Dego’s playing, to resist the extroverted Paganini-meets-Brahms appeal of the Concerto, which he completed shortly before embarking on the Sonata no.2. Indeed, her approach to both this and the Brahms on the new album illuminates just how deeply Busoni was influenced by Brahms’s example, working in some near-direct quotations, and thus also where he went his own way with a lightness of spirit that he struggled to emulate in his later music. ‘There are some passages with pretty much the same notes, like the triplets in the coda of the finale, where if you play it by heart, you actually risk going into the wrong piece.’

Dego first picked up the Busoni Concerto in 2017. ‘It’s been in my head since then, but there’s a lot of Italian repertoire that needs to be performed and recorded – and, may I add, in a non-archival way!’ She has no truck with the rehearse–record process by which much lesser-known music is consigned to disc. ‘A label may say, “We’re missing that,” and you end up learning it and recording it within a month, without even performing it – just so that it exists. I promised myself I would never do that with Italian repertoire. These are big pieces that need the kind of time and attention you’d give to the Sibelius Concerto. And the Busoni is unbelievably difficult.’

Dego spent time getting to grips with the Busoni in concert. ‘In every performance I tried to speed up while going deeper and deeper into the piece. I knew I wanted to record it and how I wanted it to sound – and how I didn’t want it to sound, which is safe.’ Instead, she wanted to underline the ‘fun and grotesque’ elements of Busoni’s writing that later embarrassed him. She points to the central tarantella–scherzo of the Second Violin Sonata, ‘which is obviously a homage to the finale of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, but also completely Italian. Maybe he was trying to deny this part of his heritage, but it’s part of his soul, and it comes out regardless.’

Dego concludes, ‘The Busoni risks sounding like an etude if all you do is nail the notes, which is already a challenge. It isn’t violinistic. The finale is reminiscent of the Mendelssohn with a lot of leggiero figuration, but you have to spend hundreds more hours on it, because the writing doesn’t really work. Paganini knew what he was asking for, whereas Busoni doesn’t know exactly how to achieve what he wants. Once those issues are resolved, audiences can really warm to the piece, as both a homage to Brahms and Beethoven, and a virtuoso concerto in its own right.’

WORKS Brahms Violin Concerto Busoni Violin Concerto ARTISTS Francesca Dego (vn) BBC Symphony Orchestra/Dalia Stasevska RECORDING VENUE Phoenix Concert Hall, Fairfield Halls, Croydon, UK RECORDING DATES 4 and 5 July 2023 CATALOGUE NUMBER Chandos CHSA 5333 RELEASE DATE 1 March 2024