Gramophone Magazine (2021): SAINT-SAËNS Violin Concertos Nos 1 & 3: Jinjoo Cho
Korean violinist Jinjoo Cho joins forces with former Quatuor Ébène viola player Mathieu Herzog and his Appassionato (formerly Ensemble Appassionato) for this cross section of Saint-Saëns’s works for violin and orchestra, which places the familiar (the B minor Third Concerto, Introduction and Rondo capriccioso and Havanaise) alongside the lesser known (the A major First Concerto, the Op 48 Romance), rounding it off with Herzog’s own transcription of Dalila’s famous aria for violin-viola duet. ‘It feels to me like meeting an old friend when I play Saint-Saëns’s music’, Cho tells us in the interview with herself and Herzog that forms the sole booklet note, which tells us much about their fondness for his work but less about the music itself. She has indeed been playing him for most of her career, and it shows in her way with him, which is stylish and understated, the emotions clear yet contained, her virtuosity and precision (in themselves considerable) always subordinate to expression.
Her tone is infinitely sweet, suiting Saint-Saëns’s hovering melodies down to the ground in the Havanaise, Romance and slow movement of the Third Concerto. Elsewhere there’s brilliance and attack without histrionics. The Rondo capriccioso starts out imperiously after the suavity of its Introduction, and the same surety characterises the finale of the B minor Concerto, which preens elegantly until the chorale stops it in its tracks. She can weight the tone, though: again in the B minor we notice the assertive, declamatory nobility at the start, the richness of her double-stopping, the grandeur at the bigger climaxes. The early (1853) First Concerto is in some respects an apprentice effort: its single movement feels like the torso of an incomplete work and the unremitting violin-writing barely gives the soloist time to pause or manoeuvre. Yet its energy proves really infectious and persuasive here.
The disc’s success, however, is as much Herzog’s and Appassionato’s as it is hers. David Threasher admired their Mozart symphonies on release two years ago (1/19), and you find here the same finesse and cogency of ensemble together with some wonderful playing. The exacting way the woodwind solos echo not only the melody of the Third Concerto’s Andantino, for instance, but Cho’s phrasing of it is at once immaculate and lovely, and throughout the disc we find the same insights, the same care. It’s as if Herzog, the former chamber musician, has turned these concertante works into chamber music on the largest scale with all the intimacy and refinement that entails. Some may prefer greater flamboyance in this repertory but this is a beautiful, thoughtful album that repays repeated listenings.