Feng Wei Ren Jian

‘From my father, Hu Wei Ming, a violinist and professor at the Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu, I learned all the Violin duets by BÉLA BARTÓK at a very early age, and came to love them. When I discovered the close relationship between Bartók’s Hungarian folk traditions and the folk traditions of China, I was greatly surprised: the peasant songs of Sichuan’s minority people, the Yi, were very much like Hungarian folk music!’ Zen Hu These early discoveries were of decisive importance in leading me to undertake an unusual musical journey, together with Ning Feng.

Not among his best known music, Wolfgang Mozart’s Trios for violin, cello and piano have a lighter feel than his more serious chamber pieces, say the K. 515 String Quintet or the “Dissonant” Quartet. They are more charming than profound, so I’ve always paid them much less attention than his quintets, quartets and violin sonatas, something which I also think true of many listeners. This superb release from Augustin Dumay (violin), Maria Pires (piano) and Jian Wang (cello) helps show their relative obscurity is partly caused by disappointing performances, because I very much enjoyed the three the ensemble include in this disc.

This generous coupling of Brahms’s two concertos for stringed instruments has become relatively common in the age of CD thanks to compilations like the Philips disc of Szeryng and Starker‚ analogue recordings dating from the early 1970s. Modern digital recordings expressly designed for issue in coupling are much rarer‚ the Teldec issue of Kremer and Clemens Hagen being the most notable one.