This new album continues Ondine’s award-winning series of orchestral works by Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) together with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. The series has gathered several accolades, including a Grammy nomination, a BBC Music Magazine Awards nomination, and several recording of the month awards and best recordings of the year nominations. This album includes the composer’s early hit, his folklorish masterpiece Concerto for Orchestra, which is among his most performed compositions.

The album also includes Partita for Violin and Orchestra (with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist), a virtuosic 5-movement work which in its orchestral version is not short of a Violin Concerto. The rarity in the album is Lutosławski’s Novelette from 1979, which, although fragmentary, is already pointing toward the ideas of his 3rd Symphony.

REVIEW:

This illuminating program constitutes an ideal introduction as well as a must for the composer’s admirers. In the early Concerto for Orchestra, the orchestra plays with surging vitality, but also great delicacy. In the later works on the program, the playing is again incisive rather than heavy. This is a recording to cherish.

— American Record Guide

In this album, Sergey Khachatryan presents the first recording of Ysaÿe's 6 Solo Sonatas Op.27 on the composer’s Guarneri del Gesù violin - a magnificent, hypnotic instrument!

Ysaÿe’s Op. 27 is not new to Sergey Khachatryan, who has been performing the cycle in concert for a long time. Today aged thirty-eight and the precocious First Prize Winner of the International Sibelius Competition in 2000 and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2005, the Armenian violinist once more demonstrates his radiant maturity, akin to his sumptuous recording of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas (naïve, 2008-2009, V 5181).

Here Sergey Khachatryan delivers an interpretation of heightened feelings, where what might otherwise come across as impish is deliberately turned into something fierce (the Prelude of Sonata No. 2, which uses the opening motif of Bach’s Partita No. 3), or that which is merely imitative becomes wild and relentless (the Finale of Sonata No. 4). He willfully emphasizes the popular inspiration underlying the complete collection, imbuing it with shadings and a sumptuousness previously unheard.

This 2010 release coincides with the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Elgar’s Concerto for Violin in B minor. In this performance, Nikolaj Znaider plays the Guarnerius “del Gesu” 1741 violin, which Fritz Kreisler (to whom the concerto was dedicated) played in the concerto’s 1910 premiere in London, with Elgar conducting.

Through this exciting recording, the violinist Fabio Biondi pursues his exploration of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoire for solo violin. Two years after his complete recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s solo Sonatas and Partitas (V 5467), he lands on entirely unknown territory, the Assaggi by the Swedish composer Johan Helmich Roman (1694-1758). Rarely lasting more than twelve minutes, the Assaggi is thus a fascinating melting-pot of multiple aesthetics in vogue in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Fabio Biondi champions this little-known territory of the European late baroque with a voracious generosity and highly eloquent sense of phrase.

In his own time, Roman was an important figure in the violin world. His career led him to the four corners of Europe, affording him the opportunity to meet many crucially important figures on the German and more southern musical stages, composers as well as renowned performers, especially when he was in Italy, where he visited Tartini. He also played with Handel. In Dresden, he met Pisendel, then dazzling everyone with his playing. In Hamburg, he probably met Telemann, whose Fantasias for Solo Violin, a highly creative and secret aspect of the great North German baroque master’s work, he studied intensely.

All of these encounters had a long-term influence on Johan Helmich Roman’s style, a different and important take on les goûts réunis. If the highly polyphonic structures of the Assaggi naturally remind us of the Swede’s Saxon origins (BeRI 314), if their study-like nature willingly brings to mind the twenty-four Fantasias of Telemann, works as much intended for professional musicians as for accomplished amateurs (the last movement of BeRI 310), the harmonies, which like the melodic outlines in Roman’s work are subtly tinged with an Italianate flavour, clearly recall contrasting works by Tartini (the second part of BeRI 320 for instance, or again the Andante of BeRI 324).