Francesca d

My Bach Partitas: I got to know Johann Sebastian Bach before I started playing, with the Motets on an LP disc that I wore out listening to, and with a short passage from the St Matthew Passion that I sang while my father accompanied me on the piano. Bach has always been present in my musical life and has been the safe harbour from which I have departed to discover other routes and then return regularly.

Paganini’s violin, the legendary ‘il Cannone’, made by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù in 1743, is one of the most important musical instruments in the history of Western music. Paganini was the greatest virtuoso of his time, acclaimed throughout Europe and an inspiration to performers and composers alike.

Following their critically acclaimed first volume of Mozart’s violin concertos (CHAN 20234), Francesca Dego and Sir Roger Norrington complete the set, once again with outstanding support from a reduced Royal Scottish National Orchestra. This cycle not only represents the first time Sir Roger has recorded these concertos, but the present album is also his final recording project. All five concertos were written before Mozart was twenty; nevertheless, his rapid development as a composer is evident in the progression from the first to the fifth, which has an unusual Adagio section within the first movement, an extensive slow movement, and of course the extensive ‘Turkish’ episode in the final movement (probably based on Hungarian folk music). Whilst given on modern instruments with metal strings, these are performances immersed in Norrington’s lifetime of experience in period performance practise. As The Sunday Times noted of the first album: ‘Pairing the veteran Mozartian Norrington – a pioneer of historical performance practice – with the young Italian-American soloist Dego proves inspiring in what promises to be one of the freshest of recent cycles of the Mozart concertos.’