Shostakovich Puano Concerto 2

Eldbjørg Hemsing has been a household name in her native Norway since childhood and made her solo debut with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of 11. During and after her studies in Vienna, she has absorbed repertoire ranging from Beethoven to Tan Dun, a composer she has collaborated with on several projects in both Europe and Asia. The present disc marks Eldbjørg Hemsing s first appearance on BIS, and is also her début CD. For the occasion she has chosen to highlight an all but forgotten work by a countryman, Harald Borgström. Like Grieg in the preceding generation, and indeed like many Nordic composers in the late nineteenth century, Borgström went to Germany to study. However, in contrast to Grieg who returned from Germany firmly resolved to carve out an authentic, Norwegian idiom, Borgström came back a staunch proponent of new German symphonic music.

Hilary Hahn delights in putting together works that normally don't go together. Her previous pairings of works by Beethoven and Bernstein, Barber and Meyer, and Brahms and Stravinsky went against what most listeners and critics think of as apt disc mates. And in every one so far, Hahn has succeeded: each performance is superb in its own right and each sounds even better in context of the work with which it shares disc space. But not this time. In her new recording of Mendelssohn's E minor and Shostakovich's A minor concertos, Hahn has coupled an astoundingly brilliant performance of the former with a slight and shallow performance of the latter.

Dmitry Shostakovich's two concertos for cello and orchestra, both written for Mstislav Rostropovich (whose recordings remain standards), come from 1959 and 1966. Although the first one is a more rhythmic, outgoing work, both are cut from the same cloth, with intensely inward passages alternating with material in Shostakovich's light Russian-folk mold. In the more serious stretches the cellist often stands exposed and alone, required to carry quite despairing material over long arcs. Italian cellist Enrico Dindo, not a well-known name but one that you're likely to be hearing again, is exceptionally good here. For the high point of it all, hear the final movement of the Cello Concerto No. 2, Op. 126, which is somewhere between Beethovenian and Tchaikovskian in its affect although not in its language.

With his Rigoletto Fantasy Mats Lidström revives an extremely popular form of music from the past both in form and spirit, the cobbling together of famous/popular operatic tunes to create new vehicles for instrumentalists done frequently in the 19th century. In his notes for the booklet he outlines some of the background to this and Verdi’s triumphant opera, of which “almost every aria instantly became famous. For me, this created the pleasant problem of having to choose what not to include in my fantasy: a first version ran to 55 minutes!”