On their newest release, the Latvian Skride sisters present yet more composers from their extended Baltic homeland region. The uniting thread of the works on this album is "finding one's own sound", something which each of the featured composers first had to find, and an element that the sisters effortlessly achieve as performers. All four composers on this recording share a close link with the violin, and all four had an ambivalent relationship with the German and were also all friends. The fact that all composers share a very conscious musicological relationship to their music, which brings out their "own sound" in their works, proves to be highly rewarding, both for an unsentimental musicality and for the performers' flawless, nuanced technique on the piano and violin, as well as for their open-minded listeners.

Taking a phone call, Miklós Rózsa could scarcely believe that the legendary violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz really was seriously interested in his Violin Concerto and ready to give the work its premiere – but so he did in 1956, and the first recording of the work, with its extreme technical challenges, was also made by Heifetz. And it had been just the same with the Violin Concerto by Korngold: the 1947 premiere and the brilliant first recording of this 20th-century classic again showcased Heifetz as soloist.

In the new generation of genuinely American musicians, one outstanding figure was Leonard Bernstein, an all-rounder whose early success led on to even greater heights. Bernstein rated his Violin Concerto of 1954, “Serenade,” inspired by Plato’s Symposium, as his best work ever, and this work too in its imaginatively slimmed-down scoring is now acknowledged to be an important 20th-century concerto for violin.

As an “encore,” this compilation includes the masterly Symphonic Dances from the immortal “West Side Story.”

REVIEWS:

This set of American concertos sees her widen her recorded repertoire still further and her performances of all three are highly successful. She’s very well supported by the young Finnish conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali who here appears with the two orchestras of which he’s currently Music Director. The Gothenburg Symphony does the honors on the first disc while disc two features the Tampere Philharmonic. Both orchestras make first rate contributions.

— MusicWeb International

The story of the discovery and resurrection of Britten's Double Concerto for Violin and Viola is one of those rare moments of musicological spice that can capture the interest of even the more casual music lover. Unlike it, the Violin Concerto Op. 15 found itself thrust onto the world stage of music right away, its genesis having been rather straightforward – if hardly smooth.

Winner of the first prize of the Queen Elisabeth Competition (2001) Baiba Skride displays a natural approach to music-making that has endeared her to many of today’s most prestigious conductors and orchestras worldwide. She performs the Double Concerto with violist Ivan Vukcevic, who has appeared in some of the most important venues and festivals in Europe. They are accompanied by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop, whose performances won her many Gramophone Awards.

On her first album for solo violin, internationally acclaimed and renowned Latvian violinist Baiba Skride interprets selected sonatas by Erwin Schulhoff, Paul Hindemith, Philipp Jarnach and Eduard Erdmann. Although Johann Sebastian Bach’s sonatas and partitas for violin solo are regarded as the measure of every violinist’s technical skill and maturity, compositions for unaccompanied violin became increasingly rare in subsequent epochs (the classical and the romantic era). It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that Max Reger made a conspicuous contribution in this field with altogether eleven sonatas. His example was an impetus that very plausibly inspired his contemporaries and successors to come up with the four contributions to this genre from the 1920s on this album.

REVIEW:

Skride starts with Schulhoff in the very resonant acoustic of the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin. Daniel Hope on Nimbus and Antonín Novák on Praga have approached this sonata on their own terms, too, but I like Skride’s way with it, notably the serious and darkly-voiced slow movement at its heart. She plays the Hindemith with considerable purity of expression, enjoying the droll pizzicato episodes of the third movement and the charming Mozart variations that form the finale.

Jarnach’s 1922 sonata makes for a marvelously balanced work. The opening movement, which Skride dispatches with fluidity and expressive freedom, is followed by the urgency of the Prestissimo which she subtly allows to slow before picking up the intensity of the earlier material. The finale has abrasive dialogues but clear lines—a tribute to her refinement. For many years Erdmann’s sonata had the reputation of being a doughty and unapproachable work. It was composed for the Flesch student, Alma Moodie, who never made a recording. It’s a highly abstract work, and freely tonal, but Skride plays it with the kind of appeal she’d bring to much more popular repertoire and so rides over any concerns about its unapproachability. In truth Brunnert dealt with those concerns too, but Skride has a way with its slow, uneasy elements and its quietly, wintry finale that are most impressive too.

All four works were composed between 1921 (the Erdmann) and 1927 (Schulhoff) and offer contrasting and complementary evidence of solo violin works in this period. Each has its own character and imperatives, well drawn on by Baiba Skride in this well-programmed disc.

-- MusicWeb International