Nicola Benedetti to Release a New Recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with Aurora Orchestra and Nicholas Collon
Decca Classics is thrilled to announce a new recording from Grammy award-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Op. 61, set for release on 11 April 2025. It was recorded with Aurora Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon, with everyone playing from memory.
This is a recording of a piece that emerges out of the urgency of the performances that inspired it, and as Nicola Benedetti says, to “try to approach this music with freshness of heart and mind”.
Benedetti further comments, “The solo line of this concerto was born out of an improvisatory spirit, with a lightness of touch soon to be out of fashion, with a virtuosity of integrity and poise. Many of us violinists grew up with such unhealthy reverence towards Beethoven, which soon turns into fear and an unnatural approach to his music. It can damage our ability to notice and embrace his humour, his wildness, and perhaps more importantly, the depth and power of his relationship to improvisation.”
Beethoven’s original piano version of the first movement cadenza was rearranged and adapted by Petr Limonov.
In the first movement, the music is based on the cadenza that Beethoven wrote for his own arrangement of this Violin Concerto as a Piano Concerto. Beethoven approached it in a truly revolutionary way by incorporating a timpani part into the texture, turning his cadenza into a dialogue between the pianist and the timpanist. Benedetti and Limonov felt that attempts to transcribe Beethoven’s bravura broken octaves and chromatic scales for violin in a literal way sounded too forceful for the otherwise lyrical and inward-looking nature of the piece. It gradually became clear that the cadenza needed re-writing, being true to Beethoven’s spirit, but not necessarily the letter. Usage of the timpani in a solo cadenza was as unusual at that time as it is now, so the harmonic progression leading up to it had to be unusual as well. Beethoven went around the full circle of fifths in a daring brush-stroke, employing highly sophisticated enharmonic techniques in a very subtle way as if to deliberately confuse the listener, leading him or her away from the established classical sense of tonality and preparing the ground for the timpani entry. Having started the cadenza with the same B-flat major chord as in Beethoven’s version, Benedetti and Limonov then emulated that unusual harmonic progression on the violin, albeit with a texture very different from Beethoven’s piano writing, allowing them to emphasise the element of surprise at the point of timpani entry, played on this recording by Henry Baldwin. It ensured that Beethoven’s original proportions stayed intact without making the violin writing resemble a transcription of a piano piece.
Benedetti continues, “The violin only actually plays thematic material for a few bars in the whole concerto. The rest flies free with fluidity, ornamenting the central themes played elsewhere.” Benedetti has a beautifully quixotic image for what it feels like to perform in this musical space: “like a little pixie burrowing their way through a maze, in all directions. Without the structure of the maze, it’s not nearly so fun to race around.”
The 23 minutes of the first movement create a long-breathed outpouring of sheer tunefulness, interrupted only by that wild cadenza. The slow movement is still more daringly spare, putting the soloist in an outer space of song, in another realm from the orchestra, connected to it only by tendrils and atmospheres of sound; a dream that melts into a finale whose joyfulness plants us back on the earth. Or does it? For Benedetti, the whole concerto is staged in a place of freedom, in which its musical essentials of grace and lyricism become transcendent features of a new kind of violin concerto. “I think of it looking upwards with its optimism: and of course, optimism is always most powerful in the face of adversity. That’s the Beethoven that breaks our heart and tears at our soul. But he always keeps us looking upwards, he always gives us hope.”
Nicholas Collon, Principal Conductor, Aurora Orchestra commented, ‘Since 2014, Aurora has pioneered the performance of major orchestral works from memory, but this is the first occasion on which we have undertaken the process for an instrumental concerto. Beethoven’s violin concerto was the perfect work with which to explore this approach: the orchestral accompaniment is truly symphonic in scope, and the interplay between orchestra and soloist is so rich and multi-layered. Creating an audio recording of a piece from memory raises an interesting question; does the memorised approach translate to a non-visual format? Our recording sessions in Alexandra Palace Theatre came off the back of hugely joyful live performances, in which we felt we discovered a new sense of freedom, truly exploring the symphonic nature of the score and trying to throw off the usual constraints of ‘accompanying,’ whilst also sensing a deeper communication with Nicky’s fabulous solo part. In performance and recording we placed the woodwind at the front of the orchestra, next to Nicky, for the ravishing 2nd movement, in which they ‘converse’ so closely with the violin solo. In the first movement cadenza, Nicky moved near to her duet partner – the timpani – and handed over to the bassoon solo for it to lead into the final coda. In the recording itself we tried to imagine we were making a performance in front of an audience, making longer takes than usual, an approach which feels quite natural when there is no music in place. Of course, one of the key differences of playing from memory is a visual one – both in terms of communication between players and communication between players and audience. Whilst this has to be left to the listener’s imagination, I do hope that some of the depth of commitment and love that all the players involved gave to the piece transmits to this album.’
