Romantic Violin

Born a year before Richard Wagner and dying two months after him, the apothecary's daughter Emilie Mayer from Friedland in Mecklenburg represents a type of composer who clearly moved away from the foundations of the classical masters and into her own orbit. The artist, who has found a home at cpo, composed eight symphonies, several concert overtures, a piano concerto, songs and a plethora of chamber music. The violinist Emeline Pierre Larsen has already released a highly acclaimed first string quartet album with her Constanze Quartet. She is now beginning a complete recording of Mayer's violin sonatas, in which the classical-proto romantic tone of the revered masters once again crumbles without reverting to eclecticism – a strong talent, whose stature is beyond doubt for convincing and championing interpreters.

Elgar’s violin concerto – distinctively passionate and nostalgic – is one of the great late-Romantic concertos. “It is a huge piece,” says Renaud Capuçon “both in terms of its length and its romantic and noble nature.” This is Capuçon’s first recording with Sir Simon Rattle, here conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. When Rattle chose Elgar’s Enigma Variations for his inaugural concert as the LSO’s music director in 2017, he was celebrating the close historic links between the composer and the orchestra. Not only did the LSO accompany Fritz Kreisler in the premiere of the violin concerto in 1910, Elgar became its Principal Conductor the following year. Paired with the concerto on this album is his violin sonata, first performed in 1919. Renaud Capuçon, who calls the sonata “a work of nobility and tenderness”, is joined by one of the leading British pianists of today, Stephen Hough.

…The First Sonata dates from 1895, shortly after the First Symphony, and basks securely in the warm A major which the later Sinfonia espansiva was to spend much of its time trying to recapture. Lydia Mordkovitch gives it the full romantic treatment, and it took me a couple of rehearings (with a slight reduction of volume level) to feel at ease with her big, gushing tone, vehement selfassertion and impulsive rubato.

Vieuxtemps was a towering figure in the long line of master 19th-century violinist composers, from Viotti, Rode, Bériot and Paganini to Wieniawski, Kreisler and Ysaÿe, and one of the first to use the full Romantic orchestral palette in the composition of works with soloist.

Elgar's violin concerto - distinctively passionate and nostalgic - is one of the great late-Romantic concertos. "It is a huge piece," says Renaud Capuçon "both in terms of it's length and it's romantic and noble nature." This is Capuçon's first recording with Sir Simon Rattle, here conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. When Rattle chose Elgar's Enigma Variations for his inaugural concert as the LSO's music director in 2017, he was celebrating the close historic links between the composer and the orchestra. Not only did the LSO accompany Fritz Kreisler in the premiere of the violin concerto in 1910, Elgar became it's Principal Conductor the following year. Paired with the concerto on this album is his violin sonata, first performed in 1919. Renaud Capuçon, who calls the sonata "a work of nobility and tenderness", is joined by one of the leading British pianists of today, Stephen Hough.

Christian Tetzlaff’s effortless virtuosity, purity of intonation, and slight emotional reticence perfectly suits Sibelius, making this the finest available collection of the Finnish composer’s music for violin and orchestra. In the concerto, Tetzlaff’s relative coolness makes the music sound more like Sibelius and less like a violin concerto, which is all to the good. That doesn’t mean he lacks anything in sheer technique: indeed, his first-movement cadenza impresses as one of the most impressively concentrated and musically satisfying on disc. Tetzlaff’s slow movement sings but avoids panting and heaving, while the finale realizes the music’s gentle melancholy as well as its more thrusting elements. He’s nicely accompanied by Thomas Dausgaard, whose gentle support perfectly suits the overall interpretation.

Randall Goosby presents his new album with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He has recorded the popular Violin Concerto by Max Bruch and the two Violin Concertos by Florence Price. The album also includes Price's Adoration in an arrangement for string ensemble.

Distilled sparingly over the course of Franz Schubert’s all too brief life, the few works that make up his output for violin and piano fascinate and intrigue, writing the episodes of a story that is undoubtedly fragmentary, yet in reality deeply unified in a mysterious yearning for elsewhere. Situated somewhere between the miniature of the lied and the large symphonic forms, these pieces open countless windows onto Schubert’s contrasted and tormented universe. Nathalia and Maria Milstein’s choice of a splendid Blüthner piano of 1857 plays a crucial role in the quest for unheard-of sound worlds on which this disc invites us.

Bottesini is of course familiar to many musicians and music lovers, particularly double bass players, since the composer–performer enjoyed an undisputed position as ‘the Paganini of the double bass’ throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This recording is a collection of five important pieces with a virtuosic and concerto-like compositional style, where the violin and double bass often take the lead roles in dense, surprising dialogues. It gives fans of 19th-century music an opportunity to experience the technical and creative richness of a composer who was extraordinarily artistically courageous for his time and gives due credit to musicians who for various reasons have historically been undervalued by the prevailing musical hierarchy.

Women composers had great difficulty in making their voices heard and gaining recognition during their lifetimes. Even today, they are all too rarely heard in the concert hall or the opera house. That situation obviously cries out for a change in attitude, but then come the questions: all right, let’s programme women composers, but which ones, and which of their works? In this eight-CD set featuring several hundred performers, the Palazzetto Bru Zane offers its initial answer as far as nineteenth-century France is concerned. The selections range over chamber music, orchestral works, piano pieces and songs. They highlight twenty-one female creators, from already identified personalities like Hélène de Montgeroult, Louise Farrenc, Pauline Viardot, Marie Jaëll and Mel Bonis to such completely unknown figures as Charlotte Sohy, Madeleine Jaeger, Marthe Grumbach, Jeanne Danglas, Hedwige Chrétien and Madeleine Lemariey. From now on, there will be no excuse for ignoring Romantic women composers.