It seems only yesterday that I was welcoming Simon Rattle's first EMI recording of the Fifth Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Now he has re-recorded it to round off his fine cycle with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra replacing Nightride and sunrise with the Violin Concerto. Here is a conductor with a real sense of what this music is about! His new account is very fine indeed, generally speaking tauter and at times more intense than its predecessor though it does not entirely displace it. There is a powerful atmosphere and sense of space at the very opening and the bassoon lament over pianopianissimo strings in the development section is marvellously hushed and mysterious. In the famous transition—notoriously difficult to bring off—he is faster this time round. Here he is in good company for so was Karajan in his last account (EMI)! However, the Philharmonia reading is superbly controlled and finely judged: it carries complete conviction and I do not prefer the greater impetuousity of the newcomer though on its own terms no doubt it works. The slow movement is less spacious than the earlier one but still splendidly intense and the ending could not be more sensitively or idiomatically handled. (Unfortunately we are plunged into the finale just a fraction too soon.) This is quite superb and tremendously exhilarating and the playing of the Birmingham orchestra is excellent throughout as, for that matter, is the EMI recording.
In the Violin Concerto Kennedy has the good fortune to be superbly balanced, the violin is in exactly the right perspective as it would be in the concert hall, helped just a little by the microphone, just as the eye would help to enlarge the aural image. He is the first English soloist to have tackled this work for many years and he does so with success. There is much to admire here. He gets a marvellously ethereal sound at the very opening—I am not sure that I like the slide at bar 18 and I certainly don't like the one in the finale on page 105 but why dwell on tiny blemishes when they are so few and inevitably a matter of taste. Throughout Kennedy's intonation is true, and he takes the considerable technical hurdles of this concerto in his stride. There is a touch of the zigeuner throb in the slow movement (Kyung-Wha Chung on Decca is incomparable here) but on the whole he plays with real spirit and panache. Of course, the competition is horribly keen Mullova on Philips is pure, if cool, Neveu is nobler and more aristocratic (on CD only—EMI References ( CDH7 61011-2, 3/88) and I would not prefer the newcomer to Amoyal on Erato (also on CD only— ECD 88109, 10/85); all of them differently coupled. None the less this can be confidently recommended.'