★★★★
The Serbian violinist Nemanja Radulovic is a maverick in the manner of Nigel Kennedy and David Garrett, a stage animal with a twist of difference. On his latest album, Radulovic wears a monk-like cassock down to the floor with hair down to his waist, as if he had spent the last forty days in a cave, communing with the eternal. The music he performs here is by Prokofiev, a composer whose eye was forever on the earthly and the existential. The surprise lies in the soloist’s approach.
Radulovic plays the concerto softly and with introspection, requiring the Philharmonia Orchestra (conducted by Santu-Matias Rouvali) to listen as intently as a fox in a field. These are survival issues. At this level of quietude there is no room for error or equivocation. For pure tone, you will struggle to find a more fully realised performance on record. Something of the struggle between soloist and mass gets lost in transmission, as does the composer’s bleak humour, but this is a defining account by a distinctive artist.
The album’s companion pieces are more varied in mood. A Heifetz encore taken from Prokofiev’s first symphony is neatly done, as is the mazurka from Cinderella, both with Laure Favre-Kahn as pianist. More arresting are the sonatas for one violin and two, the latter with the highly promising Swede-Norwegian Johan Dalene. The Heifetz march from Love for Three Oranges reverts to unsmiling brilliance. The final piece is the grand waltz from Cinderella, backed by a Parisian ensemble known aptly as the Devil’s Trills. The playing is diabolical, in the — rub your ears — best meaning of that word.
