The push is on to make 16-year-old Dutch violinist Noa Wildschut the prodigy of the moment, and a brief encounter with her 1714 Grancino violin is enough to hear why: it's a strikingly sharp, almost piercing sound that grabs your attention. Wildschut's sound might be more suited to Romantic music, but that's coming, and one can understand why she might have wanted to start with Mozart. Yet one may also feel that Mozart is not quite her métier. Sample the beginning of the Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 ("Turkish"). ...
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The push is on to make 16-year-old Dutch violinist Noa Wildschut the prodigy of the moment, and a brief encounter with her 1714 Grancino violin is enough to hear why: it's a strikingly sharp, almost piercing sound that grabs your attention. Wildschut's sound might be more suited to Romantic music, but that's coming, and one can understand why she might have wanted to start with Mozart. Yet one may also feel that Mozart is not quite her métier. Sample the beginning of the Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 ("Turkish"). Plenty of players take a little beat at the violin's entrance, but Wildschut's is unusually large and arguably destroys the integrity of the tempo. Her cadenzas, too, partly of her own invention, are a bit overdone. Then again, she is in touch with the melodic appeal of the music, and the album does make you want to hear more from her. She does well to include the Adagio in E major for violin and orchestra, K. 261, an alternate slow movement for the A major concerto, and in both...
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