Romantic Violinist Vln Pf

Violinist and composer Joseph Joachim was a central figure of Romanticism, famous as a personal friend of Johannes Brahms and as an arbiter of musical taste who was professionally associated with many of the 19th century's greatest musicians. Daniel Hope's The Romantic Violinist: A Celebration of Joseph Joachim paints an appealing portrait through selections of Joachim's own music, as well as short pieces by Brahms, Clara Schumann, Antonin Dvorák, Franz Schubert, and the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Max Bruch.

Great classical repertoire, discoveries, chamber music, concert literature at the very highest level: violinist Renaud Capuçon inspires as a soloist in all areas. He celebrated the power of world harmony with Bach's concertos and the modern counterpart by Peteris Vasks, allowed styles to communicate with each other with the concertos by Beethoven and Korngold as well as Brahms and Berg, and ensured one of the most high-profile large-scale chamber music projects of recent years with a complete recording of the Beethoven sonatas. He is now continuing on this path - alongside the young, multi-award-winning Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili.

Hyperion’s record of the month for May heralds a new collaboration with the brilliant young British violinist Chloë Hanslip, the former child prodigy famously signed to Warner Classics at the age of just fourteen. Here, she lends her now-mature talents to the second release in Hyperion’s overview of Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concertos and Volume 12 of the burgeoning Romantic Violin Concerto series.

Hyperion’s Romantic Violin Concerto series reaches volume 8 and the music of the Belgian composer Henry Vieuxtemps, himself widely considered the finest violinist in Europe after the death of Paganini. Listening to the repertoire recorded here, he certainly deserves to be ranked among the most important composers for the violin in the mid-nineteenth century. Vieuxtemps never indulged in sheer virtuosity for its own sake; instead in his concertos and chamber works he brought a more classical dimension to the violin repertoire in place of the technically brilliant variations and fantasies on popular operatic themes that were so popular with audiences.

There is, of course, no shortage of Romantic-era violin concertos in the instrument's standard repertoire. None of them found with any regularity on the concert stage, however, hail from Denmark. This DaCapo album demonstrates that there are indeed examples that come to us from the Scandinavian country, and even that some of them are inexplicably excluded from the modern canon.

On this release, pianist Lorna Griffitt and violinist Haroutune Bedelian present a program of works by Robert and Clara Schumann. Dr. Lorna Griffitt began her performing career at 16 as a soloist with the Louisville Orchestra under the direction of Robert Whitney. She received her doctorate from Indiana University under the tutelage of Menahem Pressler. Dr. Griffitt enjoys an active career as soloist, chamber musician, and pedagogue both in the United States and in South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Her performances include appearances in New York at Carnegie Weill Recital Hall, a live broadcast from Washington DC on NPR's Performance Today, and a solo recital at Indiana University's Auer Hall in Bloomington, Indiana. Violinist Haroutune Bedelian is a professor at the University of California at Irvine, and a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, London. He has performed in major cities, festivals and concert halls throughout North and South America, the United Kingdom, Europe and the Middle East and has appeared in numerous radio and television broadcasts.

Much of the Romantic Violin Concerto series on the Hyperion label has focused on forgotten composers, but the present release involves little-known concertos by major composers. The Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 8, by Richard Strauss was written when the composer was 17 and is a competent if rather overlong essay in the virtuoso German tradition running back to Ludwig Spohr. Ferruccio Busoni's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35a, although Busoni was in his thirties when the work was premiered in 1897, might also be called an early work; the characteristic influences from Bach and Liszt (and the mixture of the two) are not yet present.

Volume 57 in Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series turns up another ‘discovery’: the music of Swedish composer Adolf Wiklund. These little-known but lusciously tuneful works are characterized by big-boned, symphonic gestures reminiscent of Rachmaninov, yet tempered with the Nordic clarity of Grieg. Wiklund’s two piano concertos are central to his output, and in fact they enjoyed considerable popularity in Sweden until as recently as fifty years ago, when modernist sensibilities deemed them unfashionable.

Award-winning violinist Jack Liebeck brings his impassioned tones, fulsome emotional display and formidable technique to the first of three albums of music by Max Bruch.

Reger is one of those composers more talked about than listened to—caricatured as a prolific writer of organ music with a penchant for dense musical textures. But he certainly wasn’t averse to a good tune: the two Romances abound in lush lyricism, while the magnificent A major Violin Concerto shows him continuing in the tradition of the violin concertos of Beethoven and Brahms. An unashamedly symphonic work, it’s nearly an hour long—around the same length as the nearly-contemporary Elgar Violin Concerto. No less a figure than Adolf Busch championed it—first performing it when he was just sixteen.