Jörg Widmann’s second violin concerto begins like no other – as though an inquisitive child had picked up a fiddle, trying to fathom what noises a bow on strings or wood might be capable of creating. Written for his sister Carolin in 2018, this concert was its UK premiere, with Carolin the soloist and her brother conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The first movement is entitled Una Ricerca, a search, and the soloist also sings while playing, enticing the instrument to find its own voice. When melody finally emerges, the miracle of the violin is somehow underlined and the orchestra’s hitherto restrained support explodes in a volley of approval.
The long central Romanze, almost two-thirds of the whole concerto, is by turns passionate, lilting and playful: scales tossed around in a game of catch had a touch of the Sound of Music, but the music also connects back to the German Romantics, this heritage clearly as significant to Widmann as his teachers Hans Werner Henze, Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm, the violin always the protagonist in an ongoing drama. Widmann, himself a renowned clarinettist, makes free with the possibilities of the whole orchestra, including a contrabass clarinet in the lineup, mutes altering the brass and bowed crotales in the array of vital percussion. The violin accompanied by glockenspiel, or by celeste and harp, conveyed a gentle, otherworldly aura, while a manic frenzy, atmospheric yet decisive, coloured the final movement. Carolin Widmann’s playing was virtuosic and plush – a broken string and the exchanges with first desk violins managed like sleight of hand – and always with the utter conviction of being the piece’s very inspiration.
Widmann the conductor was a dynamic presence on the podium, dancing, even jumping, no baton, eloquent hands punching the air to punctuate phrases.
Mozart’s overture to the Marriage of Figaro had given a taste of this abundant energy, but for Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony to have emerged with such an electric change was astonishing. The BBCNOW musicians have been in excellent form in recent performances, but here with Widmann they were on fire, commitment and intensity ablaze. It was exhilarating.
• Broadcast on Radio 3 on 12 June and then available on BBC Sounds
