New Album Praised in the Press

"Many classical musicians are content to spend their careers in the snug embrace of the great or not-so-great works of the past. There’s no shame in that. Bringing those dots on the page to life needs not just the mastery of an instrument but deep cultural and historical imagination, as well as a capacious emotional responsiveness.

Fortunately for the health of classical music, there are those other performers who are keen to go further. They conjure new works into being by asking composers to write pieces for them. It’s potentially rewarding – the result might be a masterpiece into being – but also enormously taxing. Money has to be raised, because composers do after all need to be paid, and a venue or promoting organization must be found to host this untested piece. Probably they’ll have to answer numerous email queries from the composer, along the lines of – is this chord possible? Can I follow this note with that one? And when the piece is delivered it could turn out to be of finger-twisting difficulty.

One of these intrepid souls is the violinist Madeleine Mitchell. Though she’s no slouch when it comes to the canon, with a particular fondness for Brahms and Russian music, she’s also a tireless promoter of new composers. A small fraction of the pieces she’s commissioned or requested appear on her new CD Violin Conversations, and if you didn’t know about the personal connection you’d probably guess it from the warmth of the playing. There’s the soulful melancholy of Dybbuk, composed by Mitchell’s one-time teacher at the Royal College of Music Joseph Horowitz, best known for innumerable film and TV theme tunes including Rumpole of the Bailey. There’s the Ice Princess and the Snowman by Mitchell’s old friend Howard Blake, and a very entertaining piece combining the violin with those exasperating automated “on-hold” phone messages, by Kevin Malone.

More emotionally stirring is the evocation of the life of black American civil rights campaigner Sojourner Truth by Belize-born British composer Errolyn Wallen. More astringent in sound, but in a rewarding way, are the two “historic” pieces on the CD: the 1958 Violin Rawsthorne by the fine, now neglected composer Alan Rawsthorne, its finely honed passion beautifully revealed by Mitchell and pianist Andrew Ball, and Colloquy composed in 1960 by the 95-year-old Thea Musgrave. My own favourite alongside Rawsthorne’s sonata is Mist Waves by Cincinatti-based Douglas Knehans, its vastly slow, gentle unfolding sustained with unflagging concentration by Mitchell and the pianist Nigel Clayton. In all this is a recording of subtle charm, which shows just how approachable and various that apparently scary thing called “contemporary music” has become.