Vilde Frang on Elgar

Released last September on Warner, Vilde Frang's recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto with Robin Ticciati and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin has been garnering accolades galore over the past twelve months, winning the Concerto Prize at the BBC Music Magazine Awards back in April and at the Gramophone Awards last Wednesday evening. Reviewing the album in last year's Awards Issue (where it was Recording of the Month), Geraint Lewis declared that 'every lover of Elgar’s masterpiece should try to hear this magnificent addition to the library'.

Vilde was preparing to perform Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2 in Armenia on Wednesday so was unavailable to collect her award in person, but she met up with me earlier this month to recount how her relationship with Elgar's music blossomed from a transformative encounter with the Serenade for Strings as a teenager, why her friend Robin Ticciati proved the ideal partner for the concerto, and how the composer's own recording with the young Yehudi Menuhin confounded her expectations...

In the booklet-notes for the recording, you describe the Elgar concerto as 'a very late discovery' for you - when did you start exploring the piece?

I first heard it in my late teens, which I guess isn’t that late in the grand scheme of things, but I’d been listening to things like the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky concertos since I was very little, so it still feels like a recent discovery to me. Your tastebuds need some time to get used to Elgar’s soundworld and expression – everything is in a larger dimension than the ‘classic’ concertos, more on a symphonic scale, and I’m so proud that we’ve been able to really dig into that on this recording. 

My first encounter with Elgar’s music was when we played the Serenade for Strings in my student orchestra, and I adored it. We had the most inspiring coach for that piece: my teacher Henning Kraggerud, who was recently appointed as director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. He wasn’t that much older than the students, and I remember that he brought so much zest and life to this music. I’ve heard so many recordings that are a bit heavy, but Henning really tapped into its youthfulness – it felt like springtime or first love.

After that I got to know the Cello Concerto completely by heart – I’d listen to the Jacqueline du Pré recording over and over again on my Discman while I was doing my homework, and I think I could still play it on the violin if you asked me! The First Symphony and Violin Concerto came into my life a bit later; I was studying in Germany in my late teens, and I discovered this piece which almost nobody played over there. I remember really wanting to like it and trying so hard…but it’s a piece you need to live with for years before it gives up its secrets. I think it took me a decade to fall in love with it!

I do think it requires a lot of stamina and maturity: it takes a long time to master from a technical point of view, but you don’t truly know this piece until you put yourself on stage and actually perform it. I gave my first performance in Birmingham in 2017, and it was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done: I wanted to play it by heart and when I took my bow I remember feeling an intense wave of relief that I’d pulled it off! Doing it with the CBSO who know this music inside-out was a fantastic introduction, and I feel like I’ve been growing into the piece ever since…

Robin Ticciati has been a dear friend of mine for twenty years, and our conversations changed my approach to the concerto so much. He introduced me to the Second Symphony via a recording with Colin Davis and the LSO, and I’ll never forget listening to the second movement together because it made me see the Violin Concerto in a whole different light even though it had already been in my fingers for a couple of years by that point. Elgar wrote the two pieces in parallel, in 1910/11, and the symphony was written in memory of King Edward; the slow movement is like a huge funeral procession, and after listening to that I started hearing the same sort of depth and expansiveness in the Violin Concerto…

That was one of the reasons I wanted to record this piece with Robin: he also has this natural sensitivity to everything it requires on an emotional level, and I just adore working with him because he feels like a kindred spirit. 

When did the two of you first perform together?

We met a long time ago when he was Chief Conductor at the Swedish Chamber Orchestra – he was just starting out in his international career, and Scandinavia was awakening to the fact that he was a major talent! I was extremely excited to work with him back then, and over the years we’ve done a lot of touring together; we’ll be doing the Schumann concerto in various places this season, which is another piece that takes a while to grow on you but has become one of my favourite concertos to perform.

Do you have plans to perform and/or record more British violin concertos?

I love expanding my repertoire and exploring different musical languages: I honestly don’t know how people can play the Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos for their entire lives without getting bored, and I don’t think audiences want to hear the same old warhorses all the time either! There’s no doubt about the quality of those pieces, but they’re so overexposed - not just in the concert-hall but for auditions, competitions and masterclasses - and it does them a disservice to turn them into a sort of tourist-trap.

The Britten concerto, for instance, is one of my all-time favourite dramas in the violin repertoire – in fact I received my last Gramophone Award for the recording I did with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and James Gaffigan, coupled with the Korngold. Promoters are always grumbling that it won’t sell tickets, but part of my job is to change that: some pieces just need time to get a foothold in the repertoire, and that won’t happen unless people take a chance and programme them. 

Technically the Britten concerto has all the spectacular things which make the Tchaikovsky such a favourite, just translated into twentieth-century tonal language. I recently started playing the Double Concerto for violin and viola which he wrote when he was very young; Britten wasn’t so proud of it himself, but I love it! I did it last month with Lawrence Power and the CBSO, and hope to perform it a lot in the future…I’m also very curious about the Walton violin concerto, which I haven’t started exploring in earnest yet - as with Elgar, I think it’s been eclipsed by his Cello Concerto, and I’d love to help redress the balance.

Did you spend much time listening to historical recordings of the Elgar, or do you prefer to go into the studio with a blank slate?

Kriesler [who premiered the piece] famously never recorded it, and I would be very curious to know what that would’ve been like. But once you’ve heard Elgar’s own recording with the sixteen-year-old Menuhin you can’t spend too much time ruminating about what might have been…Menuhin was such an old soul, even at the tender age of sixteen, and Elgar was so relaxed about the whole thing – apparently he didn’t even want to have a rehearsal because he was going to Ascot to watch the races! And it’s interesting to hear the orchestral approach at that point in time: I was expecting something quite fat and heavy, but this is slim, fluid and flexible. Nothing drags, and we certainly kept that in mind when we came to make our own recording.

Apart from that important historical document, I avoided listening to other interpretations of the piece because I don’t want to be influenced by how anyone else tells the story: I always feel like the music is sending me important messages and I need to focus on that rather than opening myself up to interference. It’s like receiving too many radio signals: you need to tune into your relationship with the music and let the composer speak directly to you. Maybe in a few years’ time it will be interesting to hear how another violinist approaches it, but I never do that when I’m in the middle of the process: it’s more inspiring to listen to recordings of other pieces by the same composer, in this case the Second Symphony. 

How did you decide what to record alongside the concerto?

I was quite clear that I didn’t want to go with one of Elgar’s famous miniatures: there are so many recordings of things like Chanson de Matin, Chanson de Nuit and Salut d’amour, and I didn’t feel any special connection to those pieces so I started looking further afield… I came across this lovely William Lloyd Webber piece called The Gardens at Eastwell which is very nostalgic, like a late summer souvenir – it seemed to sit naturally alongside Elgar and is perfect for this time of year!

I was also very excited to find Carissima, and we made a new arrangement of that for violin and piano – I think there was an existing transcription already, but it wasn’t so easy to find the music. It was important for me to present something I’d found myself rather than just recording something to fill space on the album: I struggle with motivation for things like that, and I become worse and worse as the time goes by!