Unsuk Chin’s first violin concerto was premiered 20 years ago. It won her the prestigious Grawemeyer award in 2004, and brought her music to an international audience. Chin had decided not to write another violin concerto, preferring to explore other instrumental combinations, but then encountered the playing of Leonidas Kavakos, which suggested to her an entirely fresh way of approaching the form. The result is her new work for violin and orchestra, subtitled Scherben der Stille (Shards of Silence); it was co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, which got to give the first performance; Kavakos naturally was the soloist, with Simon Rattle conducting.
Chin describes the new concerto as “a subjective portrait of and a dialogue with Leonidas Kavakos’s musicianship”. It’s a single movement lasting around 25 minutes, and cast as a series of often roughly juxtaposed episodes (the “shards” of the subtitle) which develop from the thematic kernel of repeated string-crossing harmonics with which the unaccompanied violin begins the work. The solo writing is strenuously demanding – Kavakos seemed totally at ease with every one of its challenges – while the LSO relished all the usual glitter and playful fizz of Chin’s sound world. But this time there seems to be an undertow of deep seriousness to the brilliance too, which sometimes takes the music in unexpectedly dark directions.
After the premiere Rattle paired two works that were both completed in 1924, but which could hardly be more different. His account of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony seemed less stark and implacable, less forbidding perhaps, than many interpretations, but it was imposing all the same, and not as self-consciously moulded as some of his other recent Sibelius performances. In Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (the truncated “suite” from the ballet, rather than the complete work, alas), the orchestra revelled in the score’s vivid imagery: Bartók at his most aggressively dissonant. Some passages could perhaps have been sexier, others more violent, but it was all hugely impressive.
• Available to stream on Medici.tv until 6 April, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 18 January.
