Viviane Hagner, Kent Nagano - Unsuk Chin: Rocaná, Violin Concerto (2009)

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Viviane Hagner, Kent Nagano - Unsuk Chin: Rocaná, Violin Concerto (2009)

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Composer Unsuk Chin has a special relationship with Canada; long before she began wowing them at IRCAM and began to take Europe by storm, Chin's music had been heard in Canada as part of the ISCM Music Days festival, as early as 1984. Kent Nagano, a conductor with whom Chin often works, was named to the post of music director to the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in 2006, prompting her return to Canada and ultimately to this Analekta recording, Unsuk Chin: Rocaná/Violin Concerto. Both Nagano and violin soloist Viviane Hagner were on hand when the premiere of Chin's Violin Concerto was given in Berlin in 2002, and here they repeat their roles with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal; it is paired with Chin's orchestral work Rocaná, premiered in Montréal in March 2008.
The Violin Concerto to some extent comes highly anticipated; critic Alan Rich called it "the first masterpiece of the new century" and, upon its premiere, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted that it maintains "an attractive sound that proves accessible to a large audience without fawning"; in 2004, Chin was given the Grawemeyer Award on the strength of this work. It is an extraordinarily colorful work with a widely varied orchestration and strongly idiomatic to the violin; high-pitched, rapid passages; pianissimo harmonics; open strings being plucked; and some lyrical, arcing figures not dissimilar to some of the solo part of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto. Some will find this concerto's suspension of forward time and multiplicity of events invigorating and hypnotic; others may find it sounding rather like tuning up running exercises. Rocaná is strongly dramatic, equally colorful – if not a bit more so – in comparison to the Violin Concerto and moves forward with a sort of built-in, inexorable logic of its own. For listeners attuned to contemporary music, Rocaná may well prove an interesting adventure, but others may find it difficult to forgive the work's many long silences and the long arc of trajectory before it conspicuously moves ahead. Both pieces contain sections where a feeling of tension is bottled up for so long that some might not wait for the protracted release.
With some reviewers, any kind of tonal referencing in a contemporary work is tantamount to "fawning," and Chin has been enthusiastically adopted by those who maintain such views. However, it doesn't seem that Chin herself is quite so squarely in their camp; both of these pieces feel somewhat transitional, as though Chin is setting her spacecraft down on an asteroid or two while still seeking a planet, perhaps one outside the solar system. These pieces do not have quite the same absolute confidence that her works of the 1990s, such as Fantaisie mécanique, ably demonstrate. Nevertheless, Analekta's in concert recording is very spacious and well defined, if a bit distant, Hagner memorably acquits herself in the Violin Concerto, and Unsuk Chin remains a name that is one to look out for as the "new century" progresses.