The Faure Violin Concerto, and a ''world premiere recording''! I was ashamed to know nothing whatever of this work, which surely must be of some importance, and remembered that apart from the Requiem, as Martin Cooper wrote, the composer ''kept instinctively to the smaller forms''. However, the fact is that the composer wrote only two movements of this concerto, which were performed by Ovide Musin, first to the piano accompaniment of Andre Messager at the Societe Nationale de Musique on December 20th, 1878 and then at the same venue with orchestra under Edouard Colonne on April 12th, 1880. A finale was started in 1879 but never completed, and the work was never published, while since then the Andante has disappeared as well. Still, the 16-minute Allegro which is all that remains of this youthful but skilful piece is well worth hearing, with richly eloquent violin writing if only rather a subordinate role for the orchestra (one is reminded here of Chopin's piano concertos) and it is persuasively played by the young Italian soloist Rodolfo Bonucci and the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra under Enrique Batiz. Bonucci may not possess a top-class technique, as the passage with broken octaves beginning at 11'09'' shows (ditto the difficult passage starting at 15'13''), and similarly, Batiz and the orchestra do not have the refinement of the world's best, but one feels that together they convey the spirit of the music and it is good to have the work available at last on record.
The other music here is also nicely done, though it is inevitably rather a rag-bag of things chosen to fill an orchestral CD programme of Faure's music. But the recording lacks the last degree of focus and there is a lack of dynamic range, so that the gentle Berceuse and the surging cello Elegie are not as compelling as they should be, well played though the latter piece is by Viocheslav Ponomarev. A record for specialists, perhaps, rather than the general collector.'