…there is so much stirring and seductive music… and Joshua Bell brings it all off with magnificent assurance and conviction.

With his 70th birthday in 2009 and decorated with many awards, John Corigliano is one of the most prominent American composers of his generation. Thirty years ago his Clarinet Concerto made a strong initial impact and the RedViolin is his fifth concerto, with a new one for percussion to follow.
Corigliano's score for François Girard's film The Red Violin (1997) was the starting-point for the latest concerto. Even before the film was finished the composer extracted a Chaconne for violin and orchestra, which eventually became the first movement of the concerto. He felt that a single movement would get lost compared with a full-scale concerto.
And this is exactly what he has delivered – a romantic, dramatic, lyrical four-movement work with luxuriant orchestral textures that benefited from starting life as a film. In his essay in the booklet Corigliano says this context encouraged him to write with fewer inhibitions; things flowed easily, but he has cunningly adapted the work to the concert hall. Even further the RedViolin Concerto is a resourceful vehicle for the eloquence and panache of Joshua Bell, who gave the premiere in 2003. The opening movement now seems long but the ghostly Scherzo is concise and throughout there is a special rapt atmosphere in pianissimo passages.
Bell and Jeremy Denk give a polished performance of the 1963 Violin Sonata that fuses neoclassical and American styles. Ideal performances well recorded.

Corigliano's score for François Girard's film The Red Violin (1997) was the starting-point for the latest concerto. …a romantic, dramatic, lyrical four-movement work with luxuriant orchestral textures that benefited from starting life as a film.

It is an unpredictable but fascinating work, and it could surely not be presented more excitingly than by Joshua Bell, with Marin Alsop and the excellent Baltimore orchestra. The recording is extremely vivid.