Niccolò Paganini - Violin Concerto no 3

I still remember the first time I saw this recording - it was on the Cassette display rack in Cranbrook Public Library in Kent in the early 1980s.  I was about 13 and had started learning the violin at school and so was keen to listen to classical music featuring the instrument.  I hadn't heard of the 19th Century Italian virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) before but wanted to listen to this new work...

Over the past thirty years I have come to love this concerto  - to my mind it is Paganini's most tuneful, most mature and most sophisticated work for violin and orchestra.

Paganini was something of a mystery to his audiences, a showman who kept his amazing playing technique (and written solo parts) a secret - to the extent that at performances he would only give orchestra members their printed music parts at the last possible moment and would gather them up again as soon as the concert was ended.  There were no printed, published scores or solo parts. In many ways he was to 19th century concert goers what David Blaine was to street magic in the 2000s - a man of mystery!

As a result of all this secrecy the details of the concertos were lost - knowledge of them only existing in Paganini's letter to friends and business acquaintances.  However, over the last few decades the concertos have gradually been reconstructed by some very dedicated and persistent musicians. The Violin Concerto no 3 in E Major was pieced back together by Polish virtuoso violinist Henryk Szeryng (1918-1988).

The Concerto in E major was composed by Paganini in 1826. On 12 December 1826, Paganini wrote from Naples to his friend L. G. Germi that, having recently completed his Second Violin Concerto, he had now "finished orchestrating a third with a Polacca", and added: "I would like to try these concertos out on my own countrymen before producing them in Vienna, London and Paris." In the event, the Third Violin Concerto does not seem to have been premiered until July 1828 in Vienna.

The concerto is in three movements:
I. Introduzione. Andantino - Allegro marziale
II. Adagio. Cantabile spianato
III. Polacca. Andantino vivace

The manuscript was believed to have been destroyed in the Napoleonic Wars but it came to light as a result of some lively detective work on Szeryng's part.  After having searched for the concerto for many years, he was delighted to make the acquaintance of Paganini's two octogenarian great-granddaughters. The ladies suggested that he should play more of the maestro's compositions - and proceeded to show him a stack of music that had lain untouched for well over a century!  With Szeryng they took to reassembling the separate sheets.

"It took us five days to put the first movement together! Eventually we discovered a complete concerto" recounted Szeryng. It was later identified and authenticated as the missing third concerto.

The first modern performance with Szeryng as the soloist and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Gibson took place at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 10 October 1971.

Szeryng recorded it and the disc was released the day after the London premiere.

Stanley Sadie wrote in The Times:

'There were spiccatos at a breathtaking pace, the notes as even as a row of pearls;  there were handfuls of double-stops in octaves, thirds, sixths and tenths, sometimes with trills thrown in; there were lightning left-hand pizzicatos; there were long passages in harmonics, sometimes double-stopped - how many fingers, I begin to wonder, does Mr Szeryng have?'

The complete set of six violin concertos were later recorded by the violinist Salvatore Accardo with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Charles Dutoit, but to my mind Szeryng's performance of the 3rd Concerto is better than Accardo's.  He pours so much into the interpretation and precision of his technique. Paganini composed his concertos purely as vehicles to display his amazing virtuosity and as a result they can seem - to mmusicians at least - somewhat bland...  and yet Szeryng performs this concerto as if it were the Brahms or Beethoven concerto.

According to the notes in the original recording, Szeryng hhimself viewed this third concerto as Paganini's best:

"I realise now in performance" he confessed, "that the concerto is much more difficult and much more beautiful than it seemed when I first saw it.  Musically it is much better than the first, second, fourth and fifth concertos (the sixth was not discovered at this point) and technically it is the most difficult of the five. It is a concerto full of traps."

There was no more moving a moment that the recording of the cadenzas which Henryk Szeryng wrote himself and in which he tried as as far as possible from his study of Paganini's life and work to recreate what the composer himself might have played.  The orchestra had gone.  The hall had suddenly become very large and Szeryng smaller than usual - until he lifted his bow and that miraculous growth in stature began again.  In the next few moments, as the perspiration beaded and began to trickle on his brow, one had the impression of a man suddenly isolated and brought startlingly face to face with the spirit of this concerto's past.  If the ghost of Paganini every looked on those [recording] sessions it must surely have been then.

Here is a video (from YouTube) of Szeryng performing the concerto with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jan Krenz on 30 May 1973 in Smetana Hall, Prague.




Sources used: 'The Great Violinists' by Margaret Campbell , www.henrykszeryng.net/

Where to buy: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon USA,