What an excellent idea for the brilliant young violinist Sarah Chang to couple her warm and powerful reading of the Dvorák Violin Concerto not with another concerto but with one of Dvorák's most popular chamber works. She shows again what a warmly sympathetic chamber-player she is. This time she shares the leadership with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, an equally imaginative artist who similarly conveys a sense of spontaneity in almost every phrase.
As a group they give the impression of making music for fun, great artists enjoying themselves in the interplay of free expression, each challenging the others. So the first movement brings rapt playing from Chang, with Andsnes wonderfully clean in his articulation of fast triplets, and the viola player Wolfram Christ satisfyingly rich-toned in the second subject theme. The Dumka slow movement again sounds almost improvisatory, a fantasy movement, totally idiomatic, while the Scherzo is exceptionally light, taken at a challengingly fast tempo; the jauntiness of the finale is also lightly presented.
Though the recording, made in the Mozartsaal of the Konzerthaus in Vienna, has less presence than some, it's clean and well balanced.
The performance of the Concerto with Sir Colin Davis, a powerful and understanding Dvorákian, similarly draws expressive playing from Chang in a performance which treats the unconventional structure of the first movement as rhapsodic without letting tensions slip. The sense of fantasy is again irresistible, with Chang exploiting dynamic extremes, as she does in the wistfully tender slow movement, while the slavonic dance of the finale is given a winning spring. The recording made at the Watford Colosseum enhances the feeling of a big-scale performance with full-bodied sound set in a lively acoustic.