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Tag: Brahms Violin Concerto

March 10, 2012

Brahms Violin Concerto – Kyung-Wha Chung (1985)

having had a yen for Brahms lately, his grand, sweeping
concertos, I put on again Kyung-Wha Chung last night,
with André Previn, 1996, doing the Violin Concerto, a
good fit at under fifty minutes, while I simultaneously 
washed the dishes – the gods never granted me a
dishwasher, probably to keep me humble, wary of
potentially crippling, I think, hubris 
 
afterwards for the sheer exhilaration of it I wanted to
watch the whole thing over again, but another version
intrigued and beckoned, from 1985, when Chung was of
course younger, less assured, I suspected, her take maybe
less profoundly felt, not yet quite as definitive 
 
but she proved to be again Olympian, on fire, more fierce
in her attack, more defiant, Aphrodite, goddess of love,
beauty, pleasure, this time, still radiant, utterly authoritative
and convincing, paying glorious court to her host of equally
divine peers
 
this performance is of another, of an utterly transcendental, 
order, of the Brahms Violin Concerto you are not likely, nor 
are they, ever to see than either so illustrious a rendition
again
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
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November 12, 2011

Brahms Violin Concerto – Kyung-Wha Chung‏

if, may the gods forbid, you see one concerto only ever in
your lifetime, let it be this one, Kyung-Wha Chung does the
Brahms Violin Concerto incontrovertibly, such performances 
as this one are why composers write music, for interpreters
such as she to narrate their musical thought, to speak it
nearly verbally, indelibly, to bring it to unmistakable and 
categorical life, to transcendence then even perhaps, as in
this case, to our ineluctable, ineradicable consciousness,
and thereby then to our stars 

Kyung-Wha Chung sets the standard here to be achieved for
all artists, in my lifetime she has been the one to displace,
no one, not even the greatest, with the sole exception of
the inimitable of course Glenn Gould, has had the authority,
the brilliance, to outpace her, to outpace them, she is
Minerva, goddess of wisdom, poetry, magic, in outright
and unequivocal command, she is unquestionably and
irrevocably empress here, awesome, she is the highest
expression of music, utterly and irrevocably iridescent, 
incontestably and utterly sublime  
 
André Previn, with the Kölner Rundfunksinfonie Orchester,
the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Cologne, December, 1996,
supports ably, even admirably, he will make me eat my
earlier not especially flattering about him words 
 
watch 
  
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
 
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