Andrew Clements 

Busoni & Strauss: Violin Concertos, etc review – tuneful, easygoing pleasures

Tanja Becker-Bender's performance of Busoni's 1897 Violin Concerto is a fine reminder of the charms of this little-heard piece, writes Andrew Clements
  
  

Tanja Becker-Bender
Best efforts … violinist Tanja Becker-Bender. Photograph: Marco Borggreve Photograph: Marco Borggreve/PR

Busoni disowned most of his early works after he published his artistic manifesto, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, in 1907. But one of the pieces he retained was the Violin Concerto from 1897. It's audibly haunted by the ghosts of Beethoven and Brahms's violin concertos, but at just 23 minutes long, it's far less daunting. It's tuneful and easygoing too, and as Tanja Becker-Bender's performance on the latest instalment of Hyperion's romantic violin concerto series underlines, it's hard to understand why it isn't performed more often. It's paired with an even earlier work by another composer whose later music took a very different direction: the Op 8 Violin Concerto by Richard Strauss, which he completed in 1882, aged just 18. It's flashy, long-winded and rather superficial, and even Becker-Bender's best efforts can't inject much of interest into it; there's little for Garry Walker and the BBC Scottish Symphony to get their teeth into either.

 

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