Rachel+podger

Rachel Podger, “the unsurpassed British glory of the baroque violin” (The Times), and Grammy award-winning pianist Christopher Glynn recorded Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano Nos. 1, 5 and 10. Following the critically acclaimed Mozart/Jones Sonatas "Fragment Completions" (2021), this Beethoven album marks Podger & Glynn’s second release together…

Award-winning Baroque violinist Rachel Podger takes the resurgence of the Arts in England post-1660 as the compelling inspiration for her new album, The Muses Restor’d. Adopting its title as its theme, Rachel and her vivacious Brecon Baroque take the listener on a journey of captivating violin-led chamber music from Jacobean to Early Georgian England. Ranging from the gentle intimacy of consort idioms to the full-blown instrumental virtuosity of the evolving Baroque period, this album uncovers little known glories of English instrumental music and its influences.

We bundled the eight Mozart cds that Rachel Podger and Gary Cooper recorded over the last ten years into an atrractive box, with an informative note from producer Jonathan Freeman-Attwoord. The duo partnership Gary Cooper and Rachel Podger has taken them worldwide. These recordings of Mozarts Complete Sonatas for Keyboard & Violin have received countless awards and accolades, including multiple Diapason dOr awards and Gramophone Editors Choices, and hailed as benchmark recordings.

Violinst Rachel Podger presents the first recording of Bach's Cello Suites on violin. Bach had a habit of recycling his own compositions for different instruments and different uses. The examples are endless; concertos appearing as sinfonias in cantatas, or concertos for violins turned into harpsichord concertos. Podger, who has spent a fair bit of time coaching cellists, both modern and baroque alike, found herself playing along to demonstrate various points. ''I started catching myself playing some of the movements I particularly loved while warming up, and realizing that it was actually possible to play them on the violin, and to find a special expressive vocabulary at the higher pitch.''

It's well known that most of Bach's harpsichord concertos began their lives as violin concertos. Since only three violin originals survive–the ones designated as BWV 1041-43–and since these are among his greatest instrumental works, musical scholars and performers have been reversing the process, turning the harpsichord concertos back into violin originals. BWV 1060 is one such case, a concerto for two harpsichords, which sounds much less clangy and bangy in this reconstructed version for two violins.

The Baroque dream team of Rachel Podger and Kristian Bezuidenhout interpret the astonishing music of C.P.E. Bach’s Violin Sonatas in C Minor, B Minor, D Major and G Minor. The two early sonatas here from the 1730s resemble the older style of his father. Listening to these works, you can imagine J.S. Bach glancing over Emanuel's shoulders while he wrote them as a teenager at home in Leipzig. The later sonatas, written 30 to 50 years later, reveal an emancipated composer whose developed musical language embodies the 'Empfindsamer Stil', the directly emotional and rhetorical style characteristic of northern-german music of the time.

Among the many instrumental pieces that remained incomplete at Mozart's death there were four particularly beautiful fragments for violin and piano. Timothy Jones has made multiple new completions of these fragments based on Mozart's evolving style during the 1780s, exploring the open-endedness of the fragments and the different directions the music might have taken. Rachel Podger and Christopher Glynn present the world premiere recordings, which include two completions of each Sonata fragment, enabling listeners to take alternative journeys through Mozart's material.