Jazz
Dave Pike
11 products
The Polish Violin / Pike, Limonov
The acclaimed violinist Jennifer Pike returns to Chandos to explore her heritage through the repertoire of a group of composers fundamental to the history of Polish music for the violin. From Janiewicz in the late eighteenth century right through to Bacewicz in the middle of the twentieth, Poland produced a number of composer-violinists well known across Europe. All of them were talented musicians as well as composers, their compositions technically demanding. Jennifer Pike here plays music by Karlowicz, Szymanowski, Wieniawski, and Moszkowski with complete control and deep feeling, sympathetically accompanied by Petr Limonov, winner of the Nikolai Rubinstein International Piano Competition.
Like to the Lark / Phipps, Swedish Chamber Choir
REVIEW:
This is a highly attractive and innovative programme of a cappella choral music which also makes use of solo instruments. The Swedish Chamber Choir, a beautifully honed sound with a versatile tessitura (and excellent English!), are directed by Simon Phipps, who brings a sympathetic set of interpretations to much of this inwardly melancholy repertoire.
– Gramophone
Mendelssohn in Birmingham, Vol. 4 / Pike, Gardner, City of Birmingham Symphony
Review:
Pike allies the luminous beauty of her tone to her innate musicality and mercurial technique to produce an exceptionally lyrical interpretation of the evergreen Violin Concerto in E minor.
– Guardian (UK)
Rozsa: Orchestral Works, Vol. 2
Bacewicz: The Polish Violin, Vol. 2
On her second volume of Polish violin works, Jennifer Pike presents works by Bacewicz, Poldowski, and Szymanowski. Renowned for her “dazzling interpretative flair and exemplary technique” (Classic FM), violinist Jennifer Pike has taken the musical world by storm with her unique artistry and compelling insight into music from the Baroque to the present day. (Chandos)
ORCHESTRAL SONGS
IMMORTAL & BELOVED
Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending / Vittorio, Chamber Orchestra of New York
Vaughan Williams withdrew or destroyed many works from his earliest period, but with its haunting opening and luminous polyphonic textures he considered The Solent as amongst his ‘most important works’. The Fantasia is his earliest known piece for solo instrument with orchestra and contains some of his most bravura writing, contrasting with the graceful geniality of the Suite. Depicting a sublimely pastoral scene and now one of the best loved pieces ever written, Vaughan Williams called The Lark Ascending a ‘romance’, a term reserved for his most profoundly lyrical utterances.
Elgar: Violin Sonata - Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending & Violin Sonata / Pike, Roscoe
Following the success of her last album, The Polish Violin, Jennifer Pike now turns to a programme of English music that represents an essential part of her musical make-up. It was the music of Elgar that first drew her to the violin, and The Lark Ascending has featured in her programming - in many versions – throughout her career. Here we have the original version for Violin and Piano from 1914, much less frequently played than the ‘standard’ orchestral version, but fascinating for the new light it shines on such a well-known piece. Writing it against the backdrop of the First World War, Vaughan Williams took both inspiration and the title from a poem by George Meredith. Although his first sketches for a Violin Sonata date from 1887, Elgar’s Violin Sonata is one of the four late masterpieces that Elgar composed in 1918 – 19, at Brinkwells in Sussex in his final creative flush. As with The Lark, this work was composed under the shadow of the Great War. Like Elgar, Vaughan Williams wrote his only Violin Sonata towards the end of his life. Representing a culmination of the development of his compositional style, he weaves fantasy and pastoralism into the strictures of sonata form. Jennifer Pike is joined for this album by one of her regular musical partners, the pianist Martin Roscoe.
Brahms: Violin Sonatas / Pike, Poster
Reviews
Performance (Brahms) **** (R & C Schumann) ***** Recording *****
“...this is a refreshingly projected performance which boasts an almost ideal fluidity in terms of manipulation of tempo and nuance in the first movement [Brahms]... warm-hearted performances of the Clara Schumann Romances ... the distinction of the performances is never in doubt.”
Erik Levi – BBC Music magazine – May 2013
