ANDRÉ JOLIVET Violin Concerto. With Chausson, "Poème" Isabelle Faust, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Marko Letonja

Sound begets light.
Often considered to be the musical testament of André Jolivet, the Violin Concerto (1972) is headed by an aphorism from the cosmogony of the Hopi Indians: ‘The essence of man is sound: sound begets life and the spirit shows itself therein.’ According to Devy Erlih, the piece is not so much a concerto in the traditional sense as a ‘hypnotic ceremony at which the violin might be seen as the principal officiant’. Isabelle Faust offers as her coupling Chausson’s celebrated Poème. In both these works, written for the violinists Leonid Kogan and Eugène Ysaÿe respectively, the listener cannot fail to be struck by their incantatory dimension.