Viktoria Mullova - Three Classic Albums[3 CD];

When Viktoria Mullova sensationally fled from the Soviet Union to the West in 1983, she was best known for winning the 1980 Jean Sibelius Competition and the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition. It seemed logical that the hugely popular concertos of these two composers should feature on her first record release; and everyone s faith was justified when the project won a Grand Prix du Disque.
Yet these were not the usual interpretations of the two works. To connoisseurs, Mullova appeared to be the finest representative in her generation of a particular strand of the Russian violin tradition, a strand first proposed in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the shortlived Yulian Sitkovetsky and the intensely virtuosic, profound master Leonid Kogan. It was a dazzlingly clean, uncluttered violin style that shed all the baggage of the Leopold Auer tradition; and it was no coincidence that Kogan was Mullova s teacher.
Since then, Mullova has moved on to many other things, including playing the Baroque violin; but these two performances, aided and abetted by the wonderful Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa, still shine as beacons of her early brilliance and her unsentimental sympathy with the Romantic ethos.

Written for his friend Joseph Joachim, Brahms s Violin Concerto was greeted rather grumpily by other male violinists of the time; and Joachim s female pupils Marie Soldat and Leonora Jackson did as much as anyone to establish it in the concert hall. Their successors included Ginette Neveu and Ida Haendel. So when Viktoria Mullova came to record it, she was drawing on a healthy tradition and her teacher Leonid Kogan was one of the Concerto s greatest exponents.
To Brahms s unique blend of craggy monumentality and lyricism, Mullova brought slashing virtuosity, Olympian objectivity and structural strength in the outer movements, and poised beauty of tone in the central Adagio. Her security of technique and intonation was a great asset in this dramatic music.
Her partners could hardly have been better chosen. The Berlin Philharmonic was conducted by Joachim for a time and first played this Concerto under his baton in 1885, with Soldat as soloist. Claudio Abbado represented the Italian Brahmsian tradition of Arturo Toscanini and Antonio Pedrotti, which leavened Brahms s north German rigour with southern warmth; and the live recording was made on tour in Tokyo, during a series of performances with these collaborators.

No sooner had she escaped from the stifling, stultifying cultural atmosphere of the Soviet Union, than the great violinist Viktoria Mullova set about completely overhauling and modernising her repertoire. She even mastered Arnold Schoenberg s Concerto, which few players before her had even bothered to look at.
Neither Béla Bartók nor Igor Stravinsky were much played in the Soviet Union, although the latter s visit to his native Russia in 1962, after an absence of forty-eight years, stirred much interest among local musicians. David Oistrakh played Bartók s First Concerto and Igor Oistrakh his Second, but few followed their example.
Mullova was ideally placed to tackle Bartók s large-scale Second Concerto, as her training had given her a sovereign technique and temperamentally she was able to sustain its large-scale structure really a vast set of variations disguised as a normal concerto. She opted for Bartók s original ending, omitting the violin.
Her increased interest in Baroque music helped her to find the key to Stravinsky s neo-classical Concerto, with its elements of the Baroque, and she commanded the tonal focus and rhythmic brilliance for its faster passages. Undoubtedly working with Esa-Pekka Salonen, equally talented as composer and conductor, helped her to realise her interpretations in the recording studio.