Afanassiev

Gidon Kremer and Valery Afanassiev enter a hotly contested area with this new release of works for violin and piano by Schubert, and they emerge as clear leaders in the field. All of their rivals do, of course, offer fine, if not always totally sympathetic accounts of these works, but with the exception of Isaac Stern and Daniel Barenboim, none can approach the Russian duo in terms of their stylistic awareness and affinity with the hidden aspects of the Schubertian genre.

The trio on this dics is chamber music performance at its highest level of enjoyment. Listening to the CD, you get an impression of three great friends having a most delightful conversation, elegant and graceful. The recorded sound is first rate. You hear all the details of instruments being played and also the acoustic features of the room in which they performed.

This extraordinary pianist studied the piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Emil Gilels and Yakov Zak…

The trio on this dics is chamber music performance at its highest level of enjoyment. Listening to the CD, you get an impression of three great friends having a most delightful conversation, elegant and graceful. The recorded sound is first rate. You hear all the details of instruments being played and also the acoustic features of the room in which they performed. It is interesting to compare this one with a Mozart trio played by Dumay, Wang and Pires, which features more modern recorded sound and the same delight in the musicans playing the music together. The duos on this CD are equally enjoyable. I particularly like the nostalgically nasal yet lush tone of the viola Kashkashian played.

Valery Afanassiev on “WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART” Today we are too fond of clear-cut solutions and exhaustive explanations. Writers and film directors are supposed to shed light even on those nooks and crannies which should remain dark for the sake of perspective. And readers as well as cinema goers should remain in the dark about this and that for the sake of the same perspective, the same space, the same labyrinth. Alas, there are no more dark ladies either in sonnets or in novels. We have forgotten the aroma of unanswerable questions. And yet every masterpiece is an unanswerable question. And so is every artist of genius. In Pushkin's short tragedy Mozart and Salieri there are many unanswerable questions. Actually it ends with such a question: 'Is an evil deed compatible with genius?' (Gesualdo, who was unquestionably a composer of genius, killed his wife. But does this murder answer the question?)