There’s some entertaining, dazzling, smile-inducing, toe-tapping music here…Aaron Jay Kernis is the pre eminent orchestral showman of the age and his meeting of minds with Heifetz’s representative on earth James Ehnes has resulted in a concerto that goes through just about every motion possible.
Kernis doesn’t just get multiple shades of feeling from the chord sequence of his opening Chaconne; he gets that sequence to semaphore drastically different emotions while the music itself becomes stylistically more manic, roaring out that chord sequence with ominous foreboding one minute and merrily tweeting it the next. There are interesting disruptive elements in the slow movement, where Ehnes trades his fire-breathing for a pure ribbon of sound, and a dazzling finale that underlines the piece’s credentials as a concerto as much for orchestra as for violin…I’d be most keen to hear Kernis’s again.