Jaime Laredo plays Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 26 – 1986
https://youtu.be/HJiA1amSM7k?si=uCp3ah6hqfZiC0j5

I've listened to the Max Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 twice today, first early in the morning on KMFA and then later on YouTube, where I played the same recording that had been broadcast on the radio earlier.

I do like it as a piece of music, I really do; I have sections of the adagio that play through in my head repeatedly. This has long been the case with both this concerto and the not dissimilar Mendelssohn concerto for the same instrument.

Yet do I love it? Or, to couch that question in the idiom of the British middle classes, is it one of my Desert Island Discs?

The answer is no. I don't have a passion for it, I could live without it, nor does it mark a significant point in my life.

I ask myself why I don't love it. Perhaps it's a kind of romantic music that has been so exploited in our culture that it feels hackneyed. Perhaps I'm just a snob and this classical FM favourite screams "middlebrow". But that can't be the whole explanation, as I like lots of "middlebrow" music, such as Sibelius.

I wonder if the problems lies less in the specific piece than in the instrument. I have similar "like but not love" feelings about the Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky violin concertos; none of them would be on the desert island with me.

Yet if we turn to the Elgar Cello Concerto or that of Dvorak, then I am "Yes! Oh God, yes! YES!" These are pieces composed in a romantic idiom not unlike that of the Bruch concerto, are played over and over again, and exercise a similar appeal to middlebrow taste. So perhaps my loving them comes down to preference for the richer, deeper tones of the cello as opposed to the brightness of the violin when it comes to a concerto solo instrument.

With that thought in mind, I turn to Bruch's Kol Nidrei Op. 47 for cello and orchestra....and it doesn't work. Listening to it makes me feel like a woman whom a nice but unattractive man is attempting to seduce by sharing sentiments that he thinks of as tender and endearing. I'm afraid I have to friendzone Kol Nidrei.

Now if Bruch had dropped the idea of writing a violin concerto, stopped trying to affect piety in Kol Nidrei, and instead sat down and written a properly passionate full blown concerto for cello and orchestra ithen we might have had, as da yoof say, a banger.

But as racetrack wisdom has it, the horses that always win the race are Coulda, Woulda, and Shoulda.

#ClassicalMusic #MaxBruch #ViolinConcerto #Violin #Cello #KolNidrei