Pierre Rode - Violin Concerto No. 10 in B minor, Op. 19, Friedemann Eichhorn (violin), South West German Radio Orchestra, Kaiserslautern, Nicolás Pasquet (conductor)
1.Moderato - 0:00
2.Adagio - 10:33
3.Tempo di Polacca - 14:05
Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode (16 February 1774, Bordeaux - 25 November 1830) was a French violinist and composer.
The son of a perfumer, Rode showed early musical precocity and was taken to Paris at the age of thirteen by his teacher, Flauvel. Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Rode became the star pupil of Giovanni Battista Viotti, the foremost violinist of the day and the founder of the modern French violin school. In 1790 he made his solo debut in Viotti's Violin Concerto No. 13; he also joined the orchestra at the Theatre de Monsieur, where he met his longtime colleague Pierre Baillot. During the next sixteen years Rode lived the life of a travelling virtuoso, though he also joined the violin department of the newly organized Paris Conservatoire. There he collaborated with Baillot and Kreutzer on a manual of instruction for the violin.
Rode spent the years from 1804 to 1808 in Russia, where he was appointed court violinist to the Tsar. When he returned to Paris, he found that the public no longer responded with much enthusiasm to his playing. Instead of the wave of success he had ridden since he emerged from Bordeaux at the age of thirteen, the public responded only tepidly to his playing. Spohr, who heard him both before and after his Russian adventure, wrote that after Russia he found Rode's playing "cold and full of mannerism".
Rode again began travelling across Europe in 1811. In Vienna at the end of 1812, he gave the premiere of Beethoven's Violin Sonata, Op. 96 with Archduke Rudolph.
In 1821 Rode returned to the Bordeaux area where he now lived in semi-retirement. In 1828 he made a last attempt at a public concert in Paris. The concert was such a fiasco that some commentators believed it hastened his death on 25th November, 1830.
Rode's thirteen violin concertos, despite holding the interest of the nineteenth century (Wieniawski wrote a cadenza for Rode's Violin Concerto No. 7), have fallen into obscurity. (from wikipedia and album notes by Bruce R. Schueneman)
Lynn René Bayley's opinion in ‘Discovering Pierre Rode’, 2022 (excerpts):
“Rode’s music really didn’t sound like anyone else’s of his time. Oh, you can say that this phrase or that one puts you in mind of someone else, but it’s generally a later composer, not a contemporary. I only wish that Beethoven’s one and only violin concerto was half as original and inventive as most of Rode’s. This is the strange and somewhat contradictory story of a once-famous violinist and composer of works for the violin who fell out of favor long before his death, yet premiered Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 10 and left behind some of the most interesting violin concerti of the Romantic era I’ve ever heard.
I think that one of the things that most impressed me about Rode, considering the time in which he wrote these concerti, was his grasp of orchestration. Yes, some of it is more ornate than Beethoven, such as the string figures in the first movement of the Concerto No. 10 (probably written between 1804 and 1808), and that kind of harks back to an earlier style, but his orchestral writing is surprisingly rich and quite exceptional for someone who was primarily focused on his own instrument.
Rode’s scores could almost stand on their own as symphonic works, and that’s extremely unusual. Although once his own very ornate solo work comes in the orchestra recedes to being a backdrop, they continue to develop their own themes when they return, thus making each concerto a little gem. In this concerto, too, the third movement is somewhat linked to the end of the second, as in Beethoven’s and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerti which, again, were written at a future date.”