On this album Thomas Zehetmair is both soloist and conductor with the Orchestre de chambre de Paris in three works by Robert Schumann. The Violin Concerto in D minor and the Phantasie op. 131 were both written in 1853 for Joseph Joachim, and they are paired with the Symphony No. 1 "Spring" of 1841. The two violin works had very different fates. The Phantasie was heard in Schumann's lifetime, while the concerto waited more than eighty years for its premiere, in Berlin in 1937. Zehetmair plays it as Schumann wrote it, without the adjustments violinists have often made to the solo part.
Founded in 1978, the Paris orchestra appointed Zehetmair its principal conductor and artistic advisor in 2012. The recording was made in February 2014 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, with Hannelore Guittet as Tonmeister and Guido Gorna supervising, and Giselher Schubert wrote the booklet essay. Zehetmair's approach to Schumann was already known on ECM New Series through the Zehetmair Quartet, whose recording of the string quartets won the Gramophone Award as Album of the Year in 2003.
The concerto has a long history with Zehetmair. In 1988 he studied the manuscript at the Berlin State Library, found many errors in the printed score, and later contributed to the new Breitkopf Urtext edition. This is his second recording of the work, after a Teldec version from the early 1990s. The opening movement, marked In kräftigem, nicht zu schnellem Tempo, lasts over fifteen minutes and carries much of the drama. The symphony drew on Schubert's Ninth and on the poetry of Adolf Böttger, and its Larghetto and Scherzo sit between two big outer movements. The Phantasie, a single movement of about fifteen minutes, closes the disc.
In The Herald, Michael Tumelty heard "blistering performances of the Violin Concerto, its younger sibling, the Phantasie and a sizzling account of the Spring Symphony". Dominy Clements, in MusicWeb International in 2016, found the concerto "freer and more impressive than in the older recording", and judged the Phantasie perhaps the most successful performance on the disc. Tyran Grillo, on ECM Reviews in 2019, heard a Beethovenian energy in the symphony.
CD edition of ECM New Series 2396, first released on 18 March 2016.
