Augustin Hadelich: Recuerdos - A musical response to war

Augustin Hadelich’s new album is a kind of shrine to Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, which was composed in 1938 and 1939, and premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1940 with the composer’s close friend, the Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa. Hadelich reads the pacifist composer’s work as “as a reaction to the horrific Spanish Civil War”, although Britten’s explicit response to that conflict had been a Ballad of Heroes written in memory of the British volunteers who lost their lives in Spain for a Festival of Music for the People in 1939.

Hadelich brings reflective spaciousness and much tonal beauty to the concerto, which ends with Britten’s first powerful orchestral passacaglia, a form he would continue to use to great effect. The approach is less successful in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto (partly written in Spain and with castanets in the percussion section) and, although Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy is, like the Prokofiev, consistently beautifully turned, the temperature is low and there’s nothing here of the bite, swagger and seductiveness that a player like Anne-Sophie Mutter has brought to the work.

The short closing piece, Ruggiero Ricci’s fascinating solo violin transcription of Tárrega’s guitar piece, Recuerdos de la Alhambra, suffers from some rubber-band rubato.