Uwe Lämmel

This recording has been designed to introduce works for violin and piano by Greek composers or composers of partial Greek descent, whose works were inspired and shaped far from their place of birth by the influences and cultural trends of their new environments. Boris Papandopulo was based in the former Yugoslavia and his music is infused with Balkan folk music elements as displayed by his Sonata while the Meditation, which opens this recording, is infused with an elegiac atmosphere inspired by the Dalmatian coast. Dinos Constantinides lived for more than 50 years in the United States. While his Sonata for violin and piano uses the twelve-tone technique it is at the same time characterized by long sweeping melodies.

In the early part of the 19th century, Haydn’s former pupil Ignaz Pleyel was the most popular composer in Europe. The three symphonies on this recording, written during Pleyel’s most fertile period as a composer, when he had not yet turned 30, are the assured, confident creations of a young, gifted and ambitious composer. They feature two powerful minor key symphonies reminiscent of Haydn’s so called Sturm und Drang symphonies from the 1770s, while the Symphony in C major includes one of Pleyel’s most beautiful slow movements.

Christian Cannabich was one of a family of German musicians. Born in Mannheim, the son of a musician in the service of the Elector, he established himself as one of the most important of the Mannheim composers. He made Mozart welcome in Mannheim in 1777 and 1778, in the latter year following the court to Munich, when the Palatine and Bavarian electorates were united. He was much respected as an orchestra director, and died in 1798 in Frankfurt while visiting his son, the composer Carl Cannabich.

To this day, Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor continues to be the least frequently performed of all his symphonies. Not as revolutionary as the first, or as brutally reckless as the third, Bruckner’s core ambition with his Second is a constant testing, exploration, and expansion of the possibilities of the symphony. Conductor Marek Janowski and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande succeed in doing justice to the work, and the recording is clear proof of Janowski’s brilliance when it comes to conducting Bruckner. In reviewing the recording, Gramophone declared: “There’s more than a touch of the great Eugen Jochum in Janowski’s approach.”

Ce premier amour est doux et naïf, transcendant l’immense fossé entre aristocrate et villageois. Il ne pourrait jamais survivre en dehors de leur clairière secrète. Est-ce possible ? …