Miro Imai

Of all the reconstructions prompted by the 1991 Mozart jamboree, Philip Wilby’s recreation of the Violin and Piano Concerto of 1778 was the most worthwhile. Wilby skilfully completed the 120-bar fragment of the first movement and took the slow movement and finale from the unusually brilliant, ‘public’ D major Violin Sonata, K306. There are problems – not least of dates – with Wilby’s thesis that the Sonata is the ‘last resting-place’ of the projected double concerto. But the three movements certainly make a satisfying entity. Midori and Eschenbach give an immensely polished reading, phrasing with unfailing subtlety and sophistication.

Apparently a staple in Russia, the music of Taneyev exists on the fringes of the repertoire in the West, something that should be rectified–and will be if this superb CD made by a starry cast of performers gets the attention it deserves. He’s a Romantic composer, but hardly of the heart-on-sleeve variety, since he was a master of counterpoint and firmly encased his Romantic impulses in a well-fitted classical jacket. Sometimes he makes you think of a more modern, pungent Brahms with a Russian accent.

Instrumental transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach's keyboard music have been legion witness just how many there are of The Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue and yet very few of them seem to catch on. One notable exception is violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky's 1985 trio arrangement of the Goldberg Variations, made to observe Bach's tercentenary and as a memorial to pianist Glenn Gould, more readily associated with the Goldbergs than perhaps any other musician aside from Johann Gottlieb Goldberg himself.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was not only one of the greatest and most important of the German poets, but without doubt alsothe one whose lyrics were most frequently set to music. The album Goethe Project by the German soprano Ute Ziemer and pianistHiroko Imai provides a lasting impression of the diversity of composers who used Goethe's works as the basis for songs. Inaddition to popular composers such as Schumann, Grieg, Schubert, Verdi, Strauss, Wolf or Wagner, there are also barely performedworks by Amy Beach, Johann Xaver Sterkel, Fanny Hensel, Josephine Lang, Anton Webern or Alban Berg. Even to this day, Goethecontinues to fascinate composers as a poet, as shown by the songs dedicated to Ute Ziemer by Enjott Schneider (*1950), DorotheaHofmann (*1961) and Johannes Martin Krnzle (*1962), which were recorded for the first time for this CD.

Nobuko Imai has been a leading viola player since the early 1990s. She studied at Tokyo's Toho Gakuen Music School before continuing her training in the United States at both Yale University and the Juilliard School. Following her graduation from Juilliard, she triumphantly vanquished all competitors to win the highest prizes at the Munich and Geneva international competitions. She is a former member of the prestigious Vermeer Quartet, known for sharp performances of the Mozart and Beethoven chamber repertoire.