Yehudi Menuhin, Sinfonia Varsovia - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 40 & 41 (2004)

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Yehudi Menuhin, Sinfonia Varsovia - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 40 & 41 (2004)

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Many notable Mozart conductors have become broader in their tempos and more detail-obsessed as they aged. Walter, Beecham, Böhm, Klemperer, and even Sir Colin Davis have all fallen under the spell of the music's perfection to the point where they could hardly bear to let it alone. On the other side of the equation are equally great conductors such as Szell, Reiner, Casals, and Toscanini, whose vision intensified instead of mellowing. It is to the latter group that Menuhin belongs, and these superb performances call to mind Toscanini at his best, in the tensile strength of the melodic line, subtle rubato, and miraculously clear articulation.
Menuhin, in his ineffably modest manner, has been a consistently successful conductor over the last twenty-five years. One remembers highly satisfying recordings of Handel's Water Music, the Bach violin concertos, suites, and Brandenburgs, with his own Festival Orchestra from the 60s, and recent discs of quality devoted to Elgar and Vaughan Williams. His Mozart conducting is very individual and entirely convincing. He chooses swift tempos for all the fast movements, but never exceeds the limit beyond which complete clarity can be achieved. The andante of the “Jupiter,“ conversely, moves at a perilously deliberate pace which is vindicated by the levitated song of the violins floating blissfully over the bar lines. And throughout are imperceptibly subtle adjustments of tempo and phrase: the oft-discussed re-transition to the recap in the opening movement of K. 550 sounds like a conjurer's coup instead of the textbook demonstration it has tended to become.
Menuhin is traditional in confining repeats to those universally observed. In neither of the slow movements, or the finale of K. 551, are any repeats taken. (I, for one, have had enough of forty-five-minute renderings of the supremely economical “Jupiter.“) He is more interested in making maximum impact the first time around. Perhaps the most striking feature of the playing is the etched clarity of articulation of the smallest notes. Like Toscanini, Menuhin insists on our perceiving the tiniest pair of thirty-second notes as clearly as the long notes of the principal themes. You will never hear the andante of K. 550 done with more loving, jewel-like clarity than here.
The Sinfonia Varsovia is an expanded, forty-member descendant of the Polish Chamber Orchestra. I would not have guessed from the records they made several years ago under Maksym-iuk that they were capable of such astounding ensemble or such cultivated purity of tone.

–Elliott Kaback

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Yehudi Menuhin, Sinfonia Varsovia - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 40 & 41 (2004)

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