Veronika Smolikova

For her debut concerto album, violinist Veronika Eberle revisits a work that has endured more than two centuries, and shares a fresh interpretation featuring new cadenzas by composer Jörg Widmann.

The famous British Library in London owes one of it's musical treasures to an English tennis player: A manuscript - probably written on the continent - with violin music around 1680 from faraway Vienna. Virtuoso sonatas by and from the circle of the devil's violinist Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. Veronika Skuplik, "prima donna" in the baroque violin firmament, has worked out some of these musical stories with virtuosity and incomparable sensitivity. Without going with the zeitgeisty fashion of lush continuo, she is accompanied by Jorg Jacobi on the historic organ of the Laurentiuskirche in Langwarden.

In the third part of her highly acclaimed anthology of virtuoso Austrian violin music, the baroque violinist Veronika Skuplik once again devotes herself to works from a valuable baroque manuscript that today belongs to the rich holdings of the British Library in London, in addition to sonatas by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. A remarkably high-quality Ciaccona from the pen of the composing Emperor Leopold I forms the framework for this once again immensely discoverable excursion into late 17th century Vienna.

The 20th-century Lithuanian composer’s dialogue between modern forms of expression and folk motifs is well represented in the four works in this recording. There is a sense of playful lightness in the Romantic aesthetic of Gruodis’s work, while Banaitis incorporates national lyricism with personal grief in his Sonata. Composed under the restrictions imposed by Soviet occupation, Vainiūnas’s Sonata Op. 38 is suffused with tragedy and sorrow, while the distinctive style of Juzeliūnas had an enormous impact on the future of Lithuanian music. All of these pieces are symbolic of survival and represent being truthful to one’s creative identity while under the harshest of conditions.

The 20th-century Lithuanian composer’s dialogue between modern forms of expression and folk motifs is well represented in the four works in this recording. There is a sense of playful lightness in the Romantic aesthetic of Gruodis’s work, while Banaitis incorporates national lyricism with personal grief in his Sonata. Composed under the restrictions imposed by Soviet occupation, Vainiūnas’s Sonata Op. 38 is suffused with tragedy and sorrow, while the distinctive style of Juzeliūnas had an enormous impact on the future of Lithuanian music. All of these pieces are symbolic of survival and represent being truthful to one’s creative identity while under the harshest of conditions.