Faust Anne Imhof

Using period instruments, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov breathe new life into these sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment, a tradition Mozart renewed from within, blazing the trail for Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.

Thierry Lancino’s background includes extensive periods of research at IRCAM and elsewhere, but his recent work concentrates on a lyrical and bold freedom of style embracing ideas of both seduction and spirituality. Inspired by a scene of historical impact, his Prelude and Death of Virgil dramatizes the demise of a daunting genius.

After Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky, Isabelle Faust now tackles Britten with Jakub Hruša and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, revealing a little-known facet of the British composer. This concerto, highly personal in it's language, combines drama with humor, seriousness with satire, in music of overwhelming emotional depth. The program is completed by early chamber works.

Locatelli was one of the most impressive violin virtuosos of the first half of the eighteenth century. Considered today as a sort of Baroque Paganini, he left picturesque, colourful, strikingly modern pieces for his instrument. A few years after a Mozart collaboration that earned them worldwide acclaim, Isabelle Faust and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico bring out the full narrative intensity of these concertos, worthy of the operatic stage!

Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov present the third volume in their complete set of sonatas on period instruments. Their playing, showing “great elegance and utter rigour,” is distinguished by “a tender and delicate expressiveness served by exceptionally subtle nuances” (Classica).

Locatelli was one of the most impressive violin virtuosos of the first half of the eighteenth century. Considered today as a sort of Baroque Paganini, he left picturesque, colourful, strikingly modern pieces for his instrument. A few years after a Mozart collaboration that earned them worldwide acclaim, Isabelle Faust and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico bring out the full narrative intensity of these concertos, worthy of the operatic stage!

After Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky, Isabelle Faust now tackles Britten with Jakub Hruša and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, revealing a little-known facet of the British composer. This concerto, highly personal in it's language, combines drama with humor, seriousness with satire, in music of overwhelming emotional depth. The program is completed by early chamber works.

The Mozart sonatas for fortepiano and violin, as they are accurately called, represented a genre that was beginning to become old-fashioned in Mozart's own time, with the piano the dominant instrument and the violin, during Mozart's youth at least, an almost optional accompaniment. They aren't played as often as Mozart's other chamber music, but there are many ways to play them. It is good to have a spate of new recordings oriented toward historical performance; these put the listener closer to Mozart's experimental frame of mind in this genre.

From Biber’s famous ‘Guardian Angel’ Passacaglia to Guillemain’s ‘Amusements’ and sonatas and fantasias by Matteis (father and son), Pisendel and Vilsmayr, Isabelle Faust offers us a panorama of European music for unaccompanied violin from the second half of the Baroque era. Dreamy or virtuosic, these pieces bear witness to the diversity of inspirations from Italy, France, England and the German-speaking countries - and to their marvellous intermingling echoes.