Nicola Benedetti’s New Album, “Beethoven: Violin Concerto”

Released on Decca Classics, Benedetti plays with the Aurora Orchestra and Nicholas Collon on the album

The GRAMMY Award-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti has released her recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Op. 61. In it, she performs with London’s Aurora Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon, with everyone playing from memory.

For this recording, Petr Limonov rearranged and adapted Beethoven’s original piano version of the first movement cadenza, which is based on one that Beethoven wrote for his own arrangement of this Violin Concerto as a Piano Concerto. 

Benedetti and Limonov felt that to transcribe the original broken octaves and chromatic scales for violin in a literal way sounded too forceful. Their final rewriting ensured that Beethoven’s original proportions remained without making the violin part sound like a transcription of a piano work.  

To purchase and listen to the album, click here. 

“The solo line of this concerto was born out of an improvisatory spirit, with a lightness of touch soon to be out of fashion, with a virtuosity of integrity and poise,” Benedetti said. “Many of us violinists grew up with such unhealthy reverence towards Beethoven, which soon turns into fear and an unnatural approach to his music. It can damage our ability to notice and embrace his humour, his wildness, and perhaps more importantly, the depth and power of his relationship to improvisation.

“The violin only actually plays thematic material for a few bars in the whole concerto,” she added. “The rest flies free with fluidity, ornamenting the central themes played elsewhere … I think of it looking upwards with its optimism: and of course, optimism is always most powerful in the face of adversity. That’s the Beethoven that breaks our heart and tears at our soul. But he always keeps us looking upwards, he always gives us hope.”

“Since 2014, Aurora has pioneered the performance of major orchestral works from memory, but this is the first occasion on which we have undertaken the process for an instrumental concerto,” Collon commented. “Beethoven’s violin concerto was the perfect work with which to explore this approach: the orchestral accompaniment is truly symphonic in scope, and the interplay between orchestra and soloist is so rich and multi-layered. 

“In the recording itself we tried to imagine we were making a performance in front of an audience, making longer takes than usual, an approach which feels quite natural when there is no music in place,” he continued. “Of course, one of the key differences of playing from memory is a visual one — both in terms of communication between players and communication between players and audience. Whilst this has to be left to the listener’s imagination, I do hope that some of the depth of commitment and love that all the players involved gave to the piece transmits to this album.”