Mozart Violin

For Mozart, wind instruments had their own voices, full of warmth and tenderness, as much as singers did, and his concertos are animated with an operatic sense of drama. His own experience as a violinist allowed him to write five concertos for the instrument that are full of sparky virtuosity, here conveyed with sovereign authority by Henryk Szeryng. This collection (originally released as part of the legendary Philips Classics Mozart Edition) is full of truly authoritative performances featuring internationally acclaimed artists.

Violinist Arabella Steinbacher studied her first Mozart Violin Concerto in G major at the age of eight. The legendary pianist Arthur Schnabel mentioned that the piano sonatas of Mozart are too easy for children yet too difficult for adults. In Steinbacher’s words: In Mozart one must always make sure that it’s powerful, but at the same time never sounds aggressive and that the sound always remains beautifully pure and almost angelic. And since then the piece has become the underlying theme throughout her career. She played the piece during many important moments of her life. It was also the piece that got Arabella accepted as the youngest students of Ana Chumachenko when she was nine. Yet it never came to a CD recording while listeners regularly ask for it.

Following the success of her discs of Romantic and Late Romantic repertoire, Vilde Frang has recorded Mozart’s Concertos Nos. 1 and 5 ‘Turkish’ and the Sinfonia Concertante K364, enabling music lovers to hear the Norwegian violinist perform Classical repertoire on disc for the first time. The impetus for this album was a 2012 orchestral tour of Asia conducted by Jonathan Cohen in which Vilde performed Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5. The vibrancy of their musical collaboration was something both artists were keen to repeat and commit to disc. Jonathan’s Cohen’s chamber orchestra, Arcangelo, proved the ideal partner, joined by violist Maxim Rysanov in the Sinfonia Concertante.

In another highly distinguished collaboration, the legendary Isaac Stern and Yefim Bronfman perform Mozart s mature violin sonatas over four CDs. Recorded in 1993 4, several years after the pair first collaborated, the sonatas demonstrate their excellent rapport (Gramophone) in these delicate works. Bronfman and Stern take an approach … that veers toward neither confection nor meat and potatoes, settling rather on a Mozart who is both graceful and tastefully muscular, wrote Classical.net of the third volume.

Frank Peter Zimmermann - Mozart - Violin Concertos Nos. 1, 3, 4 (2015) {Hänssler Classic 98.039}
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© 2015 Hänssler Classic | CD 98.039
Classical / Concerto / Violin

Frank Peter Zimmermann is an excellent violinist, and an ideal Mozart interpreter. His rhythms are clean and crisp, his ornamentation appropriate, his vibrato always tasteful and expressive, and the tempos he and conductor Radoslaw Szulc adopt well-nigh ideal. Indeed, Mozart seems to represent the dividing line between successful historically informed and modern violin performance, with the former usually sounding dismal and the latter almost invariably proving satisfactory, at a minimum. This is ironic because, as we know, Mozart’s dad wrote the major 18th-century treatise on violin playing, and it’s amusing to hear performances that claim to follow Leopold’s rules come out sounding like dreck, as they so often do.

This double-CD group of Mozart violin-and-piano sonatas can stand on its own, and the title merely reads Mozart Violin Sonatas. It is, however, the third installment in a consistently fine Mozart cycle from pianist Cédric Tiberghien and violinist Alina Ibragimova. Deeper in the graphics the sonatas are denoted as being "for keyboard and violin," and indeed it is the keyboard that plays the dominant role even as the ways in which Mozart shakes up this configuration is part of the interest.