Bartok Enesco Frang

“I’ve wanted to record Elgar’s violin concerto for a long time,” says Vilde Frang. “It really is a journey … Such a vast piece of music with such an original structure and so many impulses and ideas … You need to take the time to savour all these moments … That is part of the magic of the piece.” She has now recorded the epic concerto with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and its music director, Robin Ticciati. The album is completed with a delightful short piece by Elgar, Carissima, in a version for violin and piano (played by Thomas Hoppe). “There are some hidden messages in the concerto,” continues Frang. “It actually starts with the answer, and then after it comes all the questions … Playing it is almost a meditative experience.” When she performed the work in the UK in 2023, the Guardian wrote: ““Not only did Frang deal with its virtuoso demands as though they barely existed, but her extraordinarily beautiful tone … seemed to honour the source of Elgar’s inspiration with a startling immediacy.”

Vilde Frang’s Encores is more than a captivating programme of short pieces for violin and piano, it is also a homage to the players of the Golden Age of the Violin, such as Fritz Kreisler, Leopold Auer and Joseph Szigeti. The recital includes music originally conceived not just for the violin, but also for piano, orchestra or voice, and proves once again, as BBC Music Magazine wrote, that “Frang has the knack of breathing life into every note, whether by variations in phrasing, attack, tone or dynamic.”

We know Gabriel Fauré the composer well but little the pedagogue. This recording aims to highlight the influence of the composer in France and even in Europe when, in 1896, he became professor at the Paris conservatory taking over from Massenet. The program of this disc wishes to bring together one of the work of his last périod and compositions by his illustrious students: Ravel, Boulanger et Enesco.

The Berliner Philharmoniker celebrate their founding day (May 1st, 1892) in a European city of cultural significance every year. In 2016, they travelled to Røros in Norway, to play in the town’s beautiful baroque church. Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang made her debut with the Berliner Philharmonker at this year’s concert, joining them for Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor.

Both concertos on this new disc were written when their composers were in the USA around the time of World War II: the Korngold was completed in 1945, the Britten in 1939. In the course of the 1930s Korngold, an Austrian Jew, had become a prominent Hollywood composer, but could not return to his homeland after 1938; the young Britten, a pacifist, left the UK for New York shortly before the declaration of war in 1939. Both composers had been child prodigies and both concertos are centred around the key of D, the most ‘natural’ key on the violin and the tonal focus for the violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky