This album is a particularly interesting and broadening way to further explore and understand Beethoven’s entourage. The name of violin virtuoso Franz Clement has only stayed in the memory of certain music fanatics for being the dedicatee and first performer of the Violin Concerto by his friend Beethoven. The two of them met in 1794, when the violinist was only 14 years old. It was in fact under Beethoven’s direction that Clement played his own Violin Concerto in D major in a charity concert which also saw the creation of the Eroica Symphony in 1805 at the Theater An der Wien.
The following year, Beethoven composed his Violin Concerto, Op. 61 in the same key, and used a melodic passage from Clement’s work at the start of the Larghetto of his concerto. A discreet homage that Beethoven was inclined to pay occasionally to his friends, like to Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, in the Allegro scherzando of his Symphony N°8.
Endowed with an elegant, light and subtle style of playing, Clement was also a talented composer according to this recording, a sort of revelation thanks to the inviting eloquence of the German-Polish violinist Mirijam Contzen, who here gives a rendition of two of Franz Clement’s violin concertos. More than just a simple historical unearthing, this album, magnificently accompanied by Reinhard Goebel’s delicate direction, does these two scores justice, scores which can easily join the great repertoire of violinists. © François Hudry/Qobuz