Isabelle, L'après Midi

Born in Prague in 1979, the composer, conductor and chorus master Ondrej Adámek, who studied in his Czech hometown and in Paris, has already won numerous prestigious awards for his orchestral, chamber, vocal and electro-acoustic music. In his musical language, which also repeatedly incorporates elements of distant cultures, he creates unusual musical narratives. He seeks the authenticity of his interpretations by combining voices and movements, gestures and theatricality, phonetic and semantic aspects, and his own specially developed musical instruments.

Isabelle Faust plays Bartok like a wonder-struck explorer confronting new terrains. She wrestles triumphantly with the First Violin Sonata's knotty solo writing, reduces her tone to a whisper for the more mysterious passages, employs a wide range of tonal colours and trans forms the finale's opening bars into a fearless war dance. This is cerebral music with a heart of fire and will brook no interpretative compromises: you either take it on its own terms, or opt for something milder.

Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov present the third volume in their complete set of sonatas on period instruments. Their playing, showing “great elegance and utter rigour,” is distinguished by “a tender and delicate expressiveness served by exceptionally subtle nuances” (Classica).

After Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky, Isabelle Faust now tackles Britten with Jakub Hrůša and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, revealing a little-known facet of the British composer. This concerto, highly personal in its language, combines drama with humour, seriousness with satire, in music of overwhelming emotional depth. The programme is completed by early chamber works.

Locatelli was one of the most impressive violin virtuosos of the first half of the eighteenth century. Considered today as a sort of Baroque Paganini, he left picturesque, colourful, strikingly modern pieces for his instrument. A few years after a Mozart collaboration that earned them worldwide acclaim, Isabelle Faust and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico bring out the full narrative intensity of these concertos, worthy of the operatic stage!