After Liya Petrova won joint first prize at the 2016 Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition, jury President Nikolaj Znaider declared he had been “absolutely blown...

After Liya Petrova won joint first prize at the 2016 Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition, jury President Nikolaj Znaider declared he had been “absolutely blown away by how she had absorbed the Nielsen violin concerto - how it had become hers”. From her debut album on Orchid Classics you can hear just why she made such an impression on those who heard her performance. The Strad praised the ‘iron will’ Petrova brought to Nielsen’s concerto; a fortitude which is matched on this recording by the sensitivity in her approach to the first violin concerto of Sergei Prokofiev. Liya Petrova was born in Sofia Bulgaria. She studied at the Hochschule fur Musik und Theater in Rostock with Petru Munteanu, with Augustin Dumay at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth in Brussels, with Antje Weithaas at the Hochschule fur Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin and with Renaud Capucon at the Haute Ecole Musique in Lausanne. She is a laureate of the Tibor Varga and Louis Spohr Competitions and has been admitted as a soloist of the Deutscher Musikrat.

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REVIEW:

Liya Petrova won the 2016 Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition which made this disc of Nielsen’s only Violin concerto inevitable. It is quite some years since this piece was so rare in the recorded catalogue that one had to search hard to find anything. Today one can choose from something like thirty or forty recordings including some by the top celebrity names. I have eight recordings in my own collection alone. That being so, Liya Petrova has to justify recommendation. The first point in her favour is the gorgeous sound she produces. This really is the most beautiful playing, matched with considerable power and apparently limitless technique. This last also coming to her aide in Prokofiev’s much more famous First Concerto.

Prokofiev’s work is more normal in that it does represent the two key characteristics of its composer in the 1910s, lyricism and spikey virtuosity. The great virtuoso Szigeti was drawn, says the note, to its “mixture of fairy-tale naiveté and daring savagery” and he went on to bring the work international fame. Petrova is fully up to the savage and lyrical demands whilst still sounding remarkably beautiful.

The Odense orchestra has the Nielsen in their blood. They must play more of it than most orchestras, being right in the middle of home territory, in a hall bearing his name and right next door to the best Nielsen archive there is. The complex lines of, especially, the wind players are superbly done. I find the recorded sound of these fine orchestral players slightly foggy. Maybe some injudicious multiplication of microphones has worked against clarity.

If the coupling of the Nielsen and Prokofiev appeals then you are in for a rare pleasure with Liya Petrova’s lovely playing. She obviously deserved her win in that competition and her busy schedule of concerts across Europe playing all the standard, and some of the not-so-standard works, reflects a career on the rise.

– MuiscWeb International (Dave Billinge)