The music of John Corigliano always communicates vividly and his striking new score for Francois Girard’s The Red Violin proves no exception. Indeed, Corigliano’s freely eclectic, post-modernist style made him an ideal choice for a story that travels through time and place from seventeenth-century Cremona to present-day Montreal, taking in Vienna, Oxford and Shanghai on the way.
From the haunting opening “Anna’s theme” (whose voice imperceptibly metamorphoses into that of the Red Violin itself, a process magically reversed at the very end of the score) and the gravely intense seven-chord chaconne (track 2) that derives from it, Corigliano proceeds to fashion a richly-worked score of outstanding craft and fertile imagination. Naturally, the sheer versatility of the writing stands out – witness the formal Bachian counterpoint of “The monastery” (track 6) or the suitably Zigeuner-like fireworks of “Pope’s gypsy cadenza” (track 10) – but such are Corigliano’s formidable compositional gifts that the pastiche never becomes weary. Above all, one remembers the superbly idiomatic solo writing, which always manages to harness grateful virtuosity to uncompromising integrity.
A notable achievement, then, as is the sharply inventive, predominantly dark-hued 17-and-a-half-minute Chaconne that the composer simultaneousy fashioned from the score’s earliest ideas (namely, Anna’s theme, the chaconne and the solo studies at the end of the Viennese sequence). It certainly makes a rewarding concert-piece for Joshua Bell, who performs with his customary bravura and personable warmth throughout. The Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen could not be more supportive, and the sound is spectacularly wide-ranging to match.'