Description

Barber and Walton wrote their concertos in 1939; Bloch orchestrated his suite, composed 16 years earlier, in the same year. All three pieces are among their composers’ most lyrical, songful creations, with their long, arching melodies, lush, tonal harmonies, and frankly romantic sensibility. Each demands plenty of brilliance from the soloist: Barber in the perpetual-motion last movement, Walton in the scampering Italian capriccioso and the parodistic, flat-footed, march-like finale. Joshua Bell has all the qualities to make him these works’ consummate interpreter: unlimited virtuosity always used in the service of the music, a flawlessly beautiful, intense tone with a warm glow in the low register and a shimmering radiance in the stratospheric passages, and a genuine, heartfelt expressiveness. With total empathy, he brings out every mood: Barber’s intimate, dreamy inwardness and rhapsodic ardor, Bloch’s mournful lamentation and joyous ecstasy, and Walton’s mercurial shifts from soaring and lyrical to wistful, dancing, and assertive moods. This is a splendid recording, except that the orchestra is sometimes too loud. –Edith Eisler