Beethoven: Violin Concerto and Romances

When Charlie Siem gets asked what he did during the pandemic lockdowns, the answer is this recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, planned and prepared during weeks of isolation in Florence, where he just happened to be holed up at the same time as conductor Oleg Caetani. “We spent ages,” he says, “going through original materials, comparing rival performances and figuring out our own approach to the piece. When the lockdowns finished, we then brought it to London and recorded the concerto with the brilliant Philharmonia Orchestra.” The end result is a considered reading that moves fast but smooth, with long lines and, in Siem’s words, “more notes to the bow” than many recordings. But what also filters through is a decisive sense that this is music played not just with style, but with love. “For any violinist, the Beethoven is a landmark score, the first great Romantic concerto from which all the others take reference. But for me, it has extra resonance because it was the first musical experience I can remember—aged three, in a recording by Menuhin that introduced me to the violin. Sadly, I never got to meet him, but the emotional impact of that childhood encounter has been with me all my life.” Getting the chance, at last, to make his own mark on this music means a lot to Siem: so much that he decided not to follow common practice and couple the concerto with another of the big beasts of the fiddle repertoire. “I thought it had to stand alone,” he says. Instead, he pairs it with the two Romances by the same composer: earlier works for violin and orchestra that might be thought of as trial runs for a concerto—or at least the middle movement of one, unassumingly infused with what Siem calls the “classic, pastoral simplicity of early Beethoven. A joy to play and, hopefully, to hear.”