Renaud Capuçon album review: This is the best-ever recording of Elgar’s Sonata

Renaud Capuçon 

Elgar: Violin Concerto/Violin Sonata                                     Erato, out Friday

Rating:

A number of French cellists have recorded Elgar’s Cello Concerto, led by André Navarra, whose recording for Elgar’s centenary year with Sir John Barbirolli can be mentioned in the same breath as Jacqueline du Pré’s celebrated subsequent one with the same conductor. 

But until Renaud Capuçon came along, no French violinist has tackled the published score of the Violin Concerto on disc.

Well worth the wait; Capuçon gets it. He describes this concerto as ‘one of the noblest, etched with great poetry, full of tenderness. This work has always moved me deeply’.

And it’s obvious that Capuçon knows the piece intimately, and has thought long and hard about how to present this most deeply personal of all of Elgar’s masterpieces.

Capuçon takes his time with a more than 50-minute reading. His tone may not be so beautiful as some, such as Itzhak Perlman and Jascha Heifetz, for instance, who both made memorable recordings. 

But Capuçon penetrates further beneath the surface than either of them or almost any rival.

He is well partnered by the London Symphony Orchestra (which premiered the piece in 1910) under Simon Rattle, an accomplished Elgarian.

The recording was made last September under social-distancing rules. It’s idle to pretend that the sound is as opulent as it would have been normally.

But that should not put anyone off this album, especially since the coupling, Elgar’s Violin Sonata, finished at the end of the First World War, is such an asset. It’s much more vividly recorded, in a different venue, with Capuçon partnered by pianist Stephen Hough. 

Capuçon and Hough really go for it. There is nothing tentative here.

For me, this is the best-ever recording of the Sonata. No one sympathetic to Elgar’s music should be without it.