With four composers – three living, all women – Philippe Quint’s Milestones is a refreshing and much-needed addition to a concerto discography oversaturated with Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. Out April 4 on Pentatone Records and featuring the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) under conductor Andrew Litton, the album serves as an artistic, emotional, and professional marker for Quint: a celebration of his 40+ year violin career; the debut recordings of two concertos; and a showcase of contemporary works either written for or premiered by Quint.
The first of these is Lera Auerbach’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (2003), premiered by Quint, Alexander Treger, and the American Youth Symphony (AYS), who also commissioned the work. Divided into four movements, the concerto is full of emotional extremes and contradictions, stitched together with a persistent dread.
“Grandioso” opens with intense chords that Auerbach calls “Deathclusters,” and the morose introduction leads to a fiendish folk dance built on repetition and sequential motion. “Moderato” also opens with a Deathcluster and sneaky slides in the strings. Quint is joined by a theremin in a scherzo that is charming but unsettling; grotesque yet straining for the solace of familiarity. In the liner notes, Auerbach sees this movement as playing with listener’s perception, smashing together the comforting and the horrific.
“Andante religioso” is a passacaglia that explores the dizzying restriction of repetition. The tension and pull between Quint and the orchestra is gorgeous and frustrating in its stasis. In the final “Allegro,” the unholy dance continues, paired with a sweetly sinister lyricism whose haunting character is enhanced by the return of distant bells.
Errollyn Wallen’s Violin Concerto was premiered by Quint, Rune Bergmann, and the Calgary Philharmonic in 2024. Wallen’s fourth concerto and first for violin, the work had roots three years prior when Quint, entranced with her violin writing, approached her with the idea of a new work. Divided into three movements, the concerto is biographical, evoking Quint’s childhood in the Soviet Union and his life in the United States.
Wallen’s writing for strings is always electric and dynamic – balancing the resonant with the active – and that is also the case here. “Slow and mysterious,” even when slow, doesn’t mean static, and the interaction between Quint and the orchestra keeps the energy high and consistent. Wallen was particular in her inclusion of bells, a reference to the church bells Quint would hear as a child. “Lamenting” is a nostalgic, sorrowful setting of “Shlof Mayn Fegele,” a lullaby Quint’s grandfather would sing to him. The bombastic “Cheeky and lively” shifts from ominous to hopeful, with a cadenza leading to a gorgeous lyrical melody that calls to mind the lushness of Romantic-era concertos.
Philippe Quint — Photo by John Gress
Odyssey Rhapsody for Violin and Piano by Lora Kvint is the Russian composer’s first large-scale work for violin (and she’s also the soloist’s mother!). Written for and debuted by Quint last year at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, he is joined on piano by Litton. Inspired by the journey of Odysseus, Odyssey is elegantly virtuosic, but not at the expense of expressivity; the relationship between violin and piano is supportive rather than antagonistic and features some nice timbral shifts, one section calling for a gossamer sound that makes the violin sound like a theremin.
Quint closes the album with Adoration by Florence Price, which he describes as a bonus track. Originally for organ, this piece has found new life in an arrangement for violin and piano, and Quint’s rich, deep tone and keen emotional sense is put to effective use.
Though a bonus track, it was disappointing to find no liner notes for this increasingly popular work that was unknown for decades. It was first arranged by performer-composer Elaine Fine, followed by a published arrangement by G. Schirmer with variances in the piano (and no credited arranger) in 2019. By comparison with the scores, it is the Fine version being performed here. To include her as arranger would have been not only respectful, but historically responsible.
Despite this, Milestones is an essential album: an example of getting new works recorded so that these compositions may be downloaded, streamed, or spun in the CD player by many more people and many times over beyond the premiere. Auerbach, Wallen, and Kvint have created works that are beautifully crafted and sound like a blast to play. Quint’s performance is of the highest level; his choices and execution show a clarity of purpose that are sometimes assumed to be the domain of canonical works.
Not enough new violin music gets this treatment. Thank goodness for folks like Quint who go to the mat and remind us of the rich, resplendent creations that we miss when we keep the same works on rotation. I myself look forward to listening to these pieces many times over and maybe brushing off my own violin to see what new challenges and discoveries these gnarly, rhapsodic passages hold.
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.
You can support the work of ICIYL with a tax-deductible gift to ACF. For more on ACF, visit composersforum.org.
