I think we can safely say that the Barber Violin Concerto has finally joined the so-called 'core' repertoire. There would seem to be two kinds of performance: the intimate and the operatic. This one definitely falls into the latter category. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg is very familiar with the opening melody—and who can blame her: the phrasing is free and easy, curvaceous, the tone smokily seductive; she has a crooner's way with portamento. I am put in mind of the young Ida Haendel: retiring she is not. Except once, where she shyly steals the ravishing slow movement melody from Kieron Moore's first oboe. We don't hear enough of her in repose. Her bow is quick to overheat, her outgoing manner, her intensely 'pushy' vibrato can occasionally force intonation off the straight and narrow. And nor is Maxim Shostakovich the stabalizing influence he might be: together they are inclined to smother Barber with their affections: it's all a little overblown, overwrought; there is a gentler, more pastoral work struggling to get out.
The Shostakovich would seem to be temperamentally better suited to both. Perhaps Salerno-Sonnenberg might have explored a broader range of colour through more creative (i.e. sparer) use of vibrato and the like. It's the whiter shades of pale, the washed-out colours of introspection that I miss here. Even so, hers is an acutely sensitive, atmospheric reading and the conductor (with a responsive LSO) is still able to explore the work's darkest recesses (the polar night of the first movement) as though he's never been there before. The LSO horns sound splendidly monolithic leading the sombre Passacaglia, one of the composer's most profoundly durable inspirations. Salerno-Sonnenberg is a demonstrative chief-mourner, keening up and down the fingerboard, the vibrancy of her tone highly emotive. The long cadenza has an increasingly distracted, fitful quality and the energy generated there makes for a very exciting Burlesque finale. Forceful isn't the word for her final descents on the G string as the dance spins out of control. Soundwise, I should have welcomed a shade more immediacy from the percussion (xylophone in particular). But in general the balance is good, sometimes unusually revealing: as in the closing measures of the scherzo where queasy harmonies emerge from the undertow of orchestral strings beneath the soloist. Readers will expect me to ask one last question: do EMI intend to reissue their David Oistrakh/Maxim Shostakovich recording? It's long overdue.'