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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 another gem Jun 20, 2007
Stunning sound, great performance of an old "warhorse"; it's nice to see some fresh young talent in the world of classical music; Netrebko has done it for opera and Bell is doing it here
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
a real prodigy May 21, 2007
Having seen and heard Joshua Bell in concert this recording confirms once more the sheer beauty of his plyaing.
1 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Joshua Bell just keeps growing as musician... Jan 09, 2007
Joshua Bell astounds me every time I hear him play. I would not have ranked him '5' when I first started hearing him, but now he has grown so much as a musician, I couldn't rank him any less.
6 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Joshua Bell: a monster of the violin! Dec 19, 2006
Nine days ago we were exception witnesses when here in Caracas had the chance to watch this acclaimed violinist playing Tchaikovsky ` s Violin Concerto under the prestigious baton of Gustavo Dudamel. The sumptuous vibrato and the bright thrills literally loaded the Hall with this magic team.
Bell reminded me to Ivry Gitlis but with major poetry , which is by itself major words, because as all of us know about the grandiloquence of that extraordinary violinist.
An unforgettable concert supported by Rimski Korsakov orchestral works that culminated with an overwhelming ovation around this giant of the violin. Joshua Bell has entered into the reduced pantheon of violin's colossus.
There is no doubt about it.
47 of 54 found the following review helpful:
 3 1/2 stars for interpretation, sound and packaging Aug 31, 2006
The reviews here of this performance remind me of the reviews a few years back of a woman's rendition of a couple Bach cantatas. They focused on the beauty of her singing and nothing else.
As I said then, classical music collectors traditionally want more than a good performance, which in the CD era are a dime a dozen. To spend money on a full-price CD -- or, in this case, a $10-$16 CD -- buyers want not only performance but truthful sound and packaging that meets their needs.
In this recording, the interpretation is brilliant, the recording is magnificent but hardly truthful, and the packaging borders on failure. First, Bell's interpreation, captured from a January 2005 concert recording in the Berlin Philharmonie.
Bell, who is among the most precocious of today's young wunderkinds, is so different here from his recording of the Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos that he appears to be a different person. He even looks like a different person on the CD cover and inside pages (more on that later.)
His playing eshcews the fire and brimstone violinists have portrayed in this most romantic of concertos. In its place, Bell substitutes unTchaikovskyian subtlety, lingering rhapsody, and portamento on distended themes in his near 20-minute operning Allego moderato. This not only changes the character of the score marking to Adagio, it creates a different concerto than many have ever heard.
His approach is detailed in the notes and maybe best described when Linda Kobler says: "Bell compares the concerto's strenuous non-stop soloist's playing to 'running the four minute mile.' Its (the concerto's) brilliant execution is still, however, the sine qua non of great violin playing."
Does it succeed? That depends on your perspective. I compared this with the other recordings I had at my disposal -- the recently re-minted SACD of Heifitiz, Pierre Amoyal's recording with Dutoit and Kennedy's now out of print recording with LPO. Bell is different than all those performers. Heifitz is very distincitive and virtuosic, Amoyal mixes virtuosity with some of Bell's tenderness, and Kennedy is self-absorbed and virtusoic.
Of the four recordings I found Kennedy's the most consistently involving. Bell's performance is clearly of a different cut than these -- romantic without virtuosic tendencies and clearly more gently laid out. While he emerges in the middle and final movements in more traditional style -- with a big bang at the end that gets the audience "bravo"ing -- it is his first movement that marks this recording as unique, both for its interpretation and the way it rewrites the score markings. For his part, Michael Tilson Thomas gives Bell wonderful support throughout and the Berlin Philharmonic lives up to its reputation as one of the world's best orchestras.
The recording is hybrid SACD and is magnificent, one of the most wide ranging and detailed recordings I have ever heard. Individual instruments emerge from the mass with such clear detail that...well, they remind me of the way London made FFRR and Phase 4 recordings in the 1960s. While audiophiles will be thrilled with this recording, I found it something less than that musically.
It isn't that it's a bad recording, no sir. As I said, it is magnificent. While critics today are coming to a collective belief that SACD is what CD should have been in the first place, I think this recording shows that SACD is to music what HDTV is to viewing pictures on a small or large screen: it is better than reality.
To put it even more succinctly, this recording exceeds any performance I've ever heard in a concert hall, regardless of whether I was on stage with the orchestra, in the first row, in the back row or in the balcony. It is so good it is unrealistic.
I recently read a column by a TV critic that installed HDTV in her home after years of watching conventional televisions. She said the experience was so overwhelming that she is now addicted to HDTV. She said instead of critiquing a program she was watching, she spent all her time admiring the pores in an actor's face.
This recording lets you hear every pore in Bell's instrument and most of the pores in the orchetration, as well. The recording is so wide ranging it mimics two elements from our past: the 1960s tendency to record with 20 microphones, then mix the recordings into a final product that at times spotlights certain instruments, making them larger than life; and that failed experiment of the 1970s, quadrophenia. In either case, I am sure a comparsion of a 2005 recording to these old technologies is not a great thing.
The packaging on this CD is nearly a failure. First, buyers get only a 37-minute concerto and a couple brief makeweights on a medium priced CD. The three CDs I used in comparison mated the Tchaikovsky concerto with either the Sibelius or Brahms concertos, making any of them better buys musically. The 50 minutes of music on this one is not good value regardless of the quality of the interpretations or sound.
Second, the inside packaging leaves a lot to be desired. The four page hard paper spread includes a lot of publicity photos of Bell, Emmanuel Pahud and MTT at recording sessions, doing everything possible to maintain their stature as pop stars in the classical universe. The notes basically talk about Bell and his ideas about the concerto even though this is his second recording of the Tchaikovsky.
Like that recording from a few years back about the woman's Bach cantatas, this recording seems to me marketed exclusively to the download generation. If the music is all that matters, it's a good deal. If something besides the music is held accountable, I'd say this offering is somewhere in the middle of the crowd. It is one of the better sounding recordings in an unnatural way but it hardly is the best accounting of the music or the history behind it or its composer.
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![Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto [Hybrid SACD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61NDEEN1NAL._SL160_.jpg "Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto [Hybrid SACD]")
