Isabelle Faust Mozart

For her first collaboration with the period ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, violinist Isabelle Faust performs the five Violin Concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, along with three shorter concertante works. This is an extraordinary set, for the historically informed performances, the polished sound of the group, the almost palpable presence of the players, which Harmonia Mundi has captured with superior engineering, and for the unrepressed joy in the music. Faust is the center of attention, naturally, and her refined and expressive playing immediately pulls the listener in. These are far from the most demanding concertos in the repertoire, so Faust is less concerned with technical execution than with conveying the pure feeling of the music, which is delightfully buoyant and uplifting. Under the direction of Giovanni Antonini, the group provides warm and sparkling accompaniment that gives Faust all the support she needs, but there's no doubt that she sets the emotional tone for these exquisite recordings. Highly recommended, especially for devotees of Classical style at its finest.

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).

The Mozart sonatas for fortepiano and violin, as they are accurately called, represented a genre that was beginning to become old-fashioned in Mozart's own time, with the piano the dominant instrument and the violin, during Mozart's youth at least, an almost optional accompaniment. They aren't played as often as Mozart's other chamber music, but there are many ways to play them. It is good to have a spate of new recordings oriented toward historical performance; these put the listener closer to Mozart's experimental frame of mind in this genre.

Using period instruments, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov breathe new life into these sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment, a tradition Mozart renewed from within, blazing the trail for Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.

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).

Here are two musicians at the top of their game playing, on period instruments, with a rare combination of communication and personality. They are each superb soloists, but together they achieve something very special. These are not works for violin with piano, but the other way around—yet, played like this, they amount to a meeting of equals. Faust has already recorded Mozart’s concertos to huge acclaim, and she plays these three equally rich sonatas with the same imagination and fantasy—and Melnikov meets her head-on with comparable flair.

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!

Few violinists can move between a modern instrument and a period one with such ease—not to mention with such an idiomatic approach to so many styles of music—as Isabelle Faust. Following her award-winning set of the Mozart violin concertos, the German is joined by the ever-stylish keyboard player Kristian Bezuidenhout for Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord. Both instruments sound magnificent, and these two great players bring breathtaking invention and imagination to the six sonatas. The humanity and warmth of Bach’s music is extraordinary, especially when played with the passion and flair encountered here.