Arabella L'angelo Nero

This album features two major artists, past and present: Johannes Brahms and Arabella Steinbacher. However, even the best of artists have their less than perfect moments or works. These three sonatas, as played hereby Steinbacher and Kulek, come across as less exciting, lesser works by Brahms. The Sonata No. 1 sounds rather anemic as it begins (partly because of the recording quality), but Steinbacher chooses to play without much fullness or vibrato, even though she is playing a Stradivarius.

Violinist Arabella Steinbacher studied her first Mozart Violin Concerto in G major at the age of eight. The legendary pianist Arthur Schnabel mentioned that the piano sonatas of Mozart are too easy for children yet too difficult for adults. In Steinbacher’s words: In Mozart one must always make sure that it’s powerful, but at the same time never sounds aggressive and that the sound always remains beautifully pure and almost angelic. And since then the piece has become the underlying theme throughout her career. She played the piece during many important moments of her life. It was also the piece that got Arabella accepted as the youngest students of Ana Chumachenko when she was nine. Yet it never came to a CD recording while listeners regularly ask for it.

The violin concertos of Ludwig van Beethoven and Alban Berg are, on the surface, more different from one another than two compositions could ever probably be. Yet both stand as titans within the violin repertoire and broke incredibly significant new ground. Beethoven's lone Violin Concerto was different than anything that came before it and set the tone for virtually every concerto written after it for nearly a century.

A brilliant swordsman, athlete, violin virtuoso and composer, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges might well lay claim to being the most talented figure in an age of remarkable individuals. The string quartet was still in its infancy in France in the 1770s, but while these pieces are small in scale they are exceptionally rewarding. Saint-Georges appreciated the intimate nature of this genre, avoiding overt soloistic virtuosity and exploring chamber music timbres, amply demonstrating his rich lyrical gifts and a natural ability to delight performers and audiences alike.

Star violinist Arabella Steinbacher presents Antonio Vivaldi's world-famous Four Seasons alongside Astor Piazzolla's Cuatro estaciones porteñas, creating a lively combination of baroque and tango. The enormous popularity of Vivaldi's Four Seasons tends to make us forget the original and ground-breaking nature of these violin concertos. Coupling them with Piazzolla's tango-inspired Four Seasons of Buenos Aires makes both pieces sound fresher than ever before, thanks to Steinbacher's personal engagement with the repertoire and the inspired accompaniment of the Münchener Kammerorchester.

Violinist Arabella Steinbacher and pianist Peter von Wienhardt unite here on Violino Latino for truly a spectacular performance. Steinbacher's playing is, in a word, sexy. Though of German descent, her playing is filled with all of the hot-blooded passion, rhythmic vitality, and take-no-prisoners risk taking necessary to make these works truly memorable. Heard here on a new instrument (or rather, a much older instrument the 1736 "Muntz" Stradivarius) than what was on her previous recordings, the sound she achieves is quite memorable.

Though he was not himself a violinist, Béla Bartók managed to compose two incredible violin concertos, the second of which is considered by some to be the most important violin concerto of the 20th century. The first concerto was written for the unrequited love of his youth, violinist Stefi Geyer, who never performed the work publicly and kept hold of the manuscript until her death in 1956. The two-movement work is filled with references to Bartók's relationship with her; the first movement luxuriously romantic and the second a pyrotechnic display of sheer virtuosity. The Second Concerto came about nearly two decades later from a commission.

With the release of each new album, violinist Arabella Steinbacher proves again and again that she not only performs an impressively wide and diverse repertoire, but that she commands different facets of it with incredible precision. This installment features works for violin and piano by French composers Fauré, Poulenc, and Ravel, whose output traverses three generations of wonderfully contrasting music.

After having recorded Mozart’s last three violin concertos in 2014, Arabella Steinbacher, the Festival Strings Lucerne and its leader Daniel Dodds now complete the cycle by presenting Mozart’s less well-known, but equally enchanting Violin Concertos 1 & 2, together with his Adagio in E Major and Rondos in C Major and B-flat Major…