Laura Van Der Verg

The label début of the Exclusive Chandos Artist Laura van der Heijden explores the rich musical heritage of Bohemia. She was born in England to Dutch-Swiss parents, and her career highlights already include winning the BBC Young Musician competition (aged just fifteen), the Edison Klassiek Award 2018 (for her début album) and BBC Music Magazine's Newcomer Award in 2019. Laura writes: 'Jâms and I first met in 2017, when I was mesmerised by the sensitivity of his musicianship and the colours he managed to create on the piano. Our first concert together took place in the summer of 2018 and included Janácek's Pohádka. Both of us felt incredibly drawn to this piece and also to Janácek's musical language. One of the reasons we were particularly enamoured of Pohádka (a Czech word which loosely translates as 'A Tale') was the focus of the piece on storytelling and how that invited us to let our creativity and imagination flow. This is the common thread spun throughout the repertoire that we have selected for this album; all the pieces embody the notion of passing on ancient folk tales, tales which have lived amongst peoples and across lands for centuries.

Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, the Brodsky Quartet has performed more than 3000 concerts on the major concert stages of the world and has released more than seventy recordings. A natural curiosity and insatiable desire to explore have propelled the group in many artistic directions and continue to ensure it not only a place at the very forefront of the international chamber music scene but also a rich and varied musical existence.

Following a highly successful series of concerts in the summer of 2022, Francesca Dego, Timothy Ridout, Laura van der Heijden, and Federico Colli headed into the studio to record Mozart’s Piano Quartets. Whilst he may not have been the first composer to add a viola to the popular piano trio, Mozart was certainly the first to do so with such outstanding success. In his piano quartets, the strings become an equal partner to the piano, rather than mere accompaniment – much as in his piano concertos.

Laura van der Heijden joins the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth for this album of British cello concertos. Frank Bridge’s Oration, composed in 1929–30, was intended as an outcry against the inhumanity of warfare, and a tribute to the victims of the First World War. Its arch-form single continuous movement exhibits the intense chromaticism typical of Bridge’s output from this era.

Signum’s first album with Rodrigo Ruiz highlights the Mexican composer’s musical and literary passions, in performances by world-class soloists Kerenza Peacock, Huw Watkins and Laura van der Heijden.

This is an exceptionally accomplished debut recording from cellist Laura van der Heijden, winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2012. It includes Soviet composers’ irritated and defiant responses to the Communist regime’s 1948 decree on what they could write. Prokofiev’s 1949 Sonata is a blistering, angry work, performed here with passion and guts. Myaskovsky’s 1948 Sonata, which, ironically, went on to win the Stalin Prize, harks back to the Romantic age—the richness and depth of van der Heijden’s tone is a thing to behold. The final, melancholy Lyadov Prelude is an aching portrait of Russian despair.