National Radio Orchestra - Live Broadcast
Friday, 12 February 2010 , 19.00

Those in the Theater an der Wien almost turned up their noses when they first listened to Beethoven’s Violin and Orchestra Concerto on December 23rd 1806.

Not even Franz Clement, the soloist, burst with enthusiasm because of the (almost) embarrassing first sight interpretation forced on him by the composer who had worked on the score until the eve of that particular day. And since any interpreter has his own artistic ambitions, Clement did not want to come across as inferior so he inserted (in the first two parts) a personal composition played with the violin upside down, as a token of appreciation… Do you remember Al Pacino’s last line in The Devil’s Advocate? Vanity... still my favourite sin!

More than forty years had to pass until a precocious twelve-year-old kid called Joseph Joachim and a conductor obsessed with restoring the repertoire of forgotten valuable works belonging to the Baroque and Classicism (Mendelssohn, who else?) turned Op.61 into a masterpiece. And since then every single violinist has tried his bow at Beethoven’s D major, as Bogdan Zvorişteanu has done this evening, on February12th…

N.B. The audience’s dissatisfaction (and even more than that…) made Beethoven compose also an Op. 61: a version for piano and orchestra in the D major register of the violin. And since many times improvement is an artist’s constant goal, the cadence – a bombastic one – in the first part is for piano and… timbal!

Holy vanity! Thou art the real proof that nobody is perfect… not even Beethoven…