Isabelle Faust takes a rewarding dive into the violin music of Benjamin Britten, putting the Violin Concerto next to some far less familiar early chamber music. In fact, the work that here gets its recorded premiere – the Two Pieces for violin, viola and piano, for which Faust is joined by her violist brother Boris and the pianist Alexander Melnikov – dates from as early as 1929, when Britten was still a sixth-former. They show a confident, lyrical composer busy digesting his influences, in particular the Second Viennese School.
Unsurprisingly, Britten hadn’t found his distinctive voice at that point, but it was very much there five years later when hebegan the Suite, Op 6 for violin and piano, which includes an engagingly skittish March and an exuberant Waltz, played by Faust and Melnikov with just the right balance of humour and bravura. It’s also there in 1937’s Reveille, a beguiling piece that sounds like an early study for the opera Peter Grimes. The Violin Concerto followed in 1939: here, teamed with the Munich orchestra conducted by Jakub Hrůša, Faust gives a performance that’s impassioned and intense, slightly downplaying its potential for dreaminess in favour of vigour and determination.
