Ilya Efimov Domra Kontakt Bys

Following the chamber music album “leggiero, pesante”, the orchestral “Metamusik/Postludium”, and the “Requiem for Larissa”, ECM New Series is pleased to present a most remarkable recording of Valentin Silvestrov’s “Stille Lieder”, a song cycle of great importance in the development and perception of the Ukrainian composer’s work, in a double album that also includes the premiere recording of his “Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam”.“We may feel we have always known these songs,” writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes to the “Silent Songs”, “and in a sense we have.

Although he waited until late in his career to turn to the genre, when Robert Schumann set his mind to compose sonatas for violin, he did so with an incredible flourish of activity. 1851 saw the composition of the Opp. 105 and 121 sonatas (the former being completed in barely a week). Both are models of chamber music collaboration, not virtuosic show pieces for either performer. Rather, Schumann's focus is on delicate melodies, serene interplay between violin and piano, and masterful elaboration of musical gestures. The third sonata is Schumann's completion of the so-called "FAE Sonata," a collaboration with Brahms and Albert Dietrich. This final sonata, only published in 1956, lacks the same cohesiveness and introspection that distinguish the first two sonatas. Still, it offers insight into the flights of musical fancy that characterized Schumann's declining mental health. Performing these three sonatas are violinist Ilya Gringolts and pianist Peter Laul. Gringolts has proven himself to be a master technician many times before, but here – as in his Bach recordings – sensitivity of interpretation is what really draws listeners in here. The seamless interplay he achieves with Laul produces a true sense of dialogue rather than competition. Well-balanced, technically polished, and musically enriching, this album is ideal for those looking for a complete set of these sonatas.

One of the most popular concertos in the repertoire, Brahms’ Violin Concerto was completed in 1878 and dedicated to his friend Joseph Joachim, whose cadenza is heard on this recording. An essentially lyrical work, the Concerto includes a slow movement of great beauty, which gives way to a Hungarian-style finale of mounting excitement. Schumann’s thoughtful and poetic Violin Concerto was not performed until 1937. In spite of the enthusiastic advocacy of Yehudi Menuhin, who saw in the Concerto a link between Beethoven and Brahms, it remains to this day an underrated work with many passages of great beauty.

The music of Michael Jarrell has been said to ‘examine states of dream and unreality, searching for a moment of truth’ – a truth which is often found in the lowest sonorities and slowest tempi, a place where time stands still. His works are often interrelated, not only by a certain sensitivity or a distinctive tone, but also by the recurrence of particular features that he reworks in different contexts.

Ilya Kaler is a Russian virtuoso, a pupil of Leonid Kogan. He's a first-rate fiddler and an excellent musician. Paganini's once fiendish pyrotechnics hold no terrors for him, not even the whistling harmonics, and how nicely he can turn an Italianate lyrical phrase, as in the secondary theme of the first movement of the First Concerto. Then he can set off with panache into a flying staccato, bouncing his bow neatly on the strings when articulating the delicious spiccato finales of both works. Stephen Gunzenhauser launches into the opening movements with plenty of energy and aplomb and is a sympathetic accompanist throughout.

Published in 1733, Pietro Locatelli’s L'Arte del violino for solo violin, strings, and basso continuo took both violin technique and the solo concerto as a genre into a whole new realm. The twelve concertos included in the collection also played a part in forming the image of the violin virtuoso, reaching its full bloom with Paganini towards the end of the century. While the unusually high technical demands of the solo part are obvious to the listener from the start, the great surprise comes at the end of the first and third movements of each of the concertos. Here Locatelli inserts Capriccios for the soloist alone of a difficulty previously unheard of, with a left hand technique making use of extensions, octaves, unprepared tenths, double and triple stopping, arpeggios and double trills.

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.