Ilan Volkov

Long recognized as an outstanding chamber musician, Anthony Marwood has more recently been making waves as a concerto soloist, with two contributions to the Romantic Violin Concerto series and now a disc of Britten with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. The youthful Violin Concerto, with its mix of anguished lyricism and changeability of mood nods to both Berg (whose own Violin Concerto had made a profound impression on Britten) and Prokofiev but the result is entirely personal.

The Reger concerto has a formidable reputation—dense, harmonically complex and with far too many notes for the average pianist. Who better then to decipher it than Marc-André Hamelin? In his hands this rarely recorded behemoth reveals both passion and a lyricism so often lost in lesser performances. He is wonderfully partnered by Ilan Volkov and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester who share the pianist’s desire to elucidate an often misunderstood work.

This disc juxtaposes two significant Russian works for violin and orchestra, each written by a composer with a close relationship to Tchaikovsky, and each dedicated to the great violinist and pedagogue Leopold Auer. These two concertos are both formidable display pieces, designed to show off Auer’s transcendental technique. Ilya Gringolts, acclaimed as one of the great young violin virtuosos of today and lauded for his debut recording on Hyperion, dazzles in this repertoire, ably supported by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov.

One of the most versatile trumpeters in the classical world, Simon Höfele, releases a new album “Nobody Knows” together with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Geoffrey Paterson and Ilan Volkov. On his 4th album on Berlin Classics he plays the trumpet concertos by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Christian Jost and Toshio Hosokawa, spanning an arc from the 20th to the 21st century and proves once again that the trumpet can do more than just "shine". “These three works are really important to me. I have played all three before and I was always fascinated by their darkness.”, he explains his choice of repertoire. “This is heavy, almost depressive music, and that applies to all three of these works. This is heavy music in two respects: loaded with gloom, and also not at all easy to play. The is a definitive political message to “Nobody Knows de Trouble I see”, which makes it even more fascinating.”

A second disc of Stravinsky’s ballet music from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov, this time featuring the composer’s fascinating recreation of the music of Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky’s advocation of the then unfashionable music of Tchaikovsky was well-known: he was a public champion of the composer over the Russian ‘nationalists’ such as Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1928, Stravinsky was commissioned by Ida Rubinstein to compose a ballet for her company’s season which was based on music by Tchaikovsky.

This CD brings together recent works by Edith Canat de Chizy, all written between 2011 and 2013. The three scores were inspired by the idea of movement / tempo / motion – a lightening gesture in Pierre D’eclair, the sphere of influence relayed by the electronics in Over the Sea, and the dialectic between mobile and immobile in Drift.

A new album from the Gramophone Award-winning team of Steven Osborne, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. Here they present Stravinsky’s complete music for piano and orchestra as a rare complete set, plus the Concerto in D for string orchestra. The taut rhythmic brilliance of this music is perfectly suited to the particular artistry of these performers. Volkov’s mastery of Stravinsky’s neo-classical idiom is clear from the ecstatic critical response to his recordings of many of the composer’s orchestral works.

As part of Liszt’s anniversary year Hyperion turns to some of the composer’s most underrecorded and underperformed works. Liszt’s piano music is so much in the foreground that his works for orchestra have been almost forgotten. Here we present a fascinating selection.