Tough Nut Cracked

The Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider has a taste for challenges. Two years ago, in his San Francisco Performances debut recital, he gave a stunning performance of Arnold Schoenberg's late Phantasy. The Schoenberg Concerto, a monumentally tough nut, is in his repertoire; so is Carl Nielsen's notoriously difficult one.

Edward Elgar's Concerto occupies a curious place in the violin repertoire. Elgar isn't precisely an unfamiliar composer in the United States; you can hardly go a month without tripping over a performance of the Cello Concerto, the Enigma Variations, or one of the assorted pieces for string orchestra. But the long-breathed Elgar of the symphonies and oratorios has never really taken root here. And the Violin Concerto, from 1910, belongs very much in that camp. It's long, turbulent, rhapsodic, and technically exhausting. For British violinists it is core repertoire, but Americans, with a few prominent exceptions, have generally agreed that if they're going to be playing for three-quarters of an hour nonstop, they'd rather do Brahms.

Znaider's new recording, from a live performance with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Sir Colin Davis, has a talking point attached: Znaider has the use of the same Guarneri violin on which Fritz Kreisler played the work's premiere a century ago. It's merely further proof that instruments only do what their players will them to, because Znaider sounds not in the least like Kreisler most of the time. The sound he prefers is firm, gritty, and penetrating. It's most compelling playing, full of bravado and admirably flexible rhythmically, but only in the quietest passages do you get a hint of the silky Kreisler sound.

For a live performance this is quite astonishingly clean, all the more so since it's apparent from the odd breathing noise that the soloist was miked very closely. There's occasional strain in Znaider's sound, but no technical slips. And nowhere in the performance does anything sound inconsequential or unmeant. Keeping the thread of a piece built on such a scale is no easy task. Znaider is a persuasive narrator.

Much of the credit must go to Davis, who has somehow gotten his Dresdeners to sound as though they've been playing Elgar from the age of six. This music is full of local tugs and slacks; it almost never stays in a tempo for more than a few bars, and there's a quality to its ebb and flow that's as distinctively idiomatic as Viennese waltz style. I don't think I have ever heard a German orchestra sound so comfortable in the manner.