Christian Tetzlaff: Adès, Elgar

The Strad Issue: January 2026

Description: Contrasting concertos yield different results

Musicians: Christian Tetzlaff (violin) BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds

Works: Adès: Violin Concerto ‘Concentric Paths’. Elgar: Violin Concerto

Catalogue number: ONDINE ODE14802

You don’t have to wait long to get the measure of Tetzlaff and Storgårds’s approach to Elgar’s Violin Concerto here. In fact, you don’t have to listen at all: the durations alone show this account comes in at six and seven minutes shorter than Frang and Little respectively, and eleven minutes shorter than Kennedy’s first recording.

This Elgar is taut, robust, no messing about, and it drives Tetzlaff to heights of athleticism, but that comes at a cost to eloquence and rhapsody, to gradations of mood and colour (in the orchestra too) and to that veiled Elgarian register in which so much is expressed yet nothing is overtly spoken. This reading might appeal to those who regard Elgar’s idiom as overly warm and tweedy (you could say, to those who don’t much like Elgar).

Thomas Adès’s Violin Concerto opens with ‘Rings’, scintillating in its glassy rotations, its spinning circles in which violin and orchestra turn independently but seemingly in sympathetic resonance with each other. Perhaps refreshingly, Tetzlaff is at his most eloquent in what he calls the ‘huge chaconne’ of the gnarly, searching middle movement, ‘Paths’. We turn back to circles in the final movement, ‘Rounds’, the orchestra leaning into its rhythmic groove and Tetzlaff soaring sweetly above.

EDWARD BHESANIA