Henryk Szeryng

Beethoven wrote ten sonatas for piano and violin, the best known of which are the "Spring" and the "Kreutzer" sonatas. The fame of these two works has tended to result in neglect of the remaining sonatas. This is unfortunate because Beethoven's remaining eight sonatas for piano and violin include much great music. The set of 10 works is of an appropriate size to warrant exploration of the entire group for those with a passion for the violin or for Beethoven. It includes an appealing mix of familiar and unfamiliar music.

For Mozart, wind instruments had their own voices, full of warmth and tenderness, as much as singers did, and his concertos are animated with an operatic sense of drama. His own experience as a violinist allowed him to write five concertos for the instrument that are full of sparky virtuosity, here conveyed with sovereign authority by Henryk Szeryng. This collection (originally released as part of the legendary Philips Classics Mozart Edition) is full of truly authoritative performances featuring internationally acclaimed artists.

This is the second two-CD set of Beethoven's ten sonatas for piano and violin performed by violinist Henryk Szeryng and pianist Ingrid Haebler. It includes Beethoven's final five works in this form, including the three sonatas of opus 30, the opus 47 sonata, and the opus 96 sonata.

" […] my own beguilement with Szeryng came with his performance in 1987 Atlanta with Louis Lane, of the North American premiere of the 1927 Concerto by Reynaldo Hahn, the French master of the Belle Epoch.

A cosmopolitan fluent in 7 languages, a humanitarian, and a violinist of extraordinary gifts, Szeryng became renowned as a musician's musician by combining a virtuoso technique with a probing discernment of the highest order.

Szeryng was much admired for his combination of technical virtuosity and tremendous musical integrity and knowledge. Szeryng was a leading representative of the golden age of violin playing, along with such artists as Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler; his playing embodied a lushness of tone with sophisticated phrasing and bold intensity rarely heard today.

The visiting Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra opened its concert at the 1967 Vienna Festival with a high-octane performance of Dvorák’s patriotic overture The Hussites. In the Brahms Violin Concerto, the elegant soloist Henry Szeryng and the conductor Rafael Kubelík entered into a musical dialogue that was both subtly sensitive and quick-witted. This release has been digitally mastered from the original tapes for optimal sound quality, and is sure to delight a whole new generation of listeners.

It is 13 CDs dedicated to some of the most beautiful pages of the concertos for violin and orchestra, ranging from the age 'Baroque to the Romantic period, the first half of the twentieth century, as if to emphasize the unsurpassed expressive ductility of this Polish Master, naturalized Mexican . His performances range from Bach to Bartok, Beethoven and Berg, Brahms and Lalo, from Mendelssohn to Mozart, Paganini to Ravel, Saint-Saens by Khachaturian, from Tchaikovsky to Vivaldi, and so on.