Georgy Dmitriev Violin Concerto

The last of his orchestral compositions and one of his most enduringly popular pieces, Mendelssohn's violin concerto is as much a crowd-pleaser now as it was when premiered by Ferdinand David and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1845. Its unassuming focus on melody and dynamic interaction between soloist and orchestra – rather than merely on technical feats and virtuosic showmanship – ensures its place at the heart of the violin concerto repertoire.

Only a few Austrian composers (Webern, for example) elected to stay in their homeland after Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938. Of those who left, some went to America (Schoenberg) while others went to England (Egon Wellesz). Whether they stayed or left, Austrian composers continued to write distinctly Austrian music in their own distinctive voices. In this disc of Wellesz's 1933 Piano Concerto and 1961 Violin Concerto, the musical language remains the same, fundamentally tonal in harmony, though with strong chromatic and atonal accents and essentially romantic in style, though with a dash more irony and a dollop more anguish. Both pieces are given exemplary performances by conductor Roger Epple leading the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Margarete Babinsky as the soloist in the Piano Concerto and David Frühwirth in the Violin Concerto.

Sibelius' 20th-century masterpiece is unique in its beauty, and is a favorite in concert halls worldwide, with its Scandinavian Romantic themes. A must for the serious violinist! Includes a high-quality printed music score and a compact disc containing a complete version with soloist, in split-channel stereo (soloist on the right channel); then a second version in full stereo of the orchestral accompaniment, minus you, the soloist.

This generous coupling of Brahms’s two concertos for stringed instruments has become relatively common in the age of CD thanks to compilations like the Philips disc of Szeryng and Starker‚ analogue recordings dating from the early 1970s. Modern digital recordings expressly designed for issue in coupling are much rarer‚ the Teldec issue of Kremer and Clemens Hagen being the most notable one.

Britain-to-Scotland transplant Sally Beamish wasn't just self-taught as an orchestral composer: you might say she learned by doing. According to her notes on this BIS release, one of a group covering her orchestral output, she had never written an orchestral piece or even studied orchestration when the city of Reykjavik, Iceland, commissioned her Symphony No. 1 in 1994. The result was a work full of unusual sonorities, rather loosely woven but constantly surprising, that drew on various features (formal and textural, not tonal) of the music of Scotland.

Nemanja Radulovic takes on Tchaikovsky for his second Deutsche Grammophon release, promising a personal approach to one of the warhorses of the repertory, the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35. The album's most unusual feature is the full-scale reworking of the Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33, recast here for viola, string ensemble, and piano by Radulovic collaborator Yvan Cassar and played by the violinist's (or here, violist's) own Double Sens ensemble.

For this 2013 release from Ondine, violinist Christian Tetzlaff, conductor Daniel Harding, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra present three exciting works by Jörg Widmann, a German composer who possesses an impressive talent for orchestration. The Violin Concerto is the most imposing piece on the program, at nearly a half hour in duration and of an exceptionally wide range of techniques and sonorities, and it serves as a powerfully expressive vehicle for Tetzlaff. Long lines predominate, and the tonal inflections of the chromatic writing make it quite accessible to listeners who don't normally listen to contemporary works.

Composed in 1993, the John Adams Violin Concerto is already a contemporary classic. Some reviewers say it is the best violin concerto written in the past 50 years. This new recording by Leila Josefowicz is the last word on what are now many recordings by some of the world's finest players. She first recorded the Violin Concerto in 2002 with John Adams, the composer, conducting. What makes this new recording the best? Josefowicz "owns" the piece having performed it in concert over 100 times since the premiere!

Some people still see the name Reger and are afraid to listen to the music because of all the preconceptions about it: It is dense, it is highly contrapuntal, it is harmonically wandering, it is difficult. Certainly there are works written by the great Bavarian composer Hindemith called him “the last giant in music” that could be considered virtually all of those things. And there are works by him by virtually every great composer one can name—that are less inspired, less interesting, that simply work less well than others.

Nigel Kennedy’s repackaged 1986 recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is an adventure – free, rhapsodic, emphasising the constant flow of song which is the work’s main asset. Perhaps he’s a little over-keen to emphasise what melancholy there is here, nearly bringing the outer movements to a halt with the bitter-sweet dreams of second subjects, but the Canzonetta is a miracle of introspection. All this passes Gil Shaham by. While the young Israeli clearly has a fabulous palette, conjuring a bright, beautiful sheen at the top of the instrument (though unduly spotlit by DG), he rarely uses it discriminatingly enough, and the sense of flexible movement so vital for the Tchaikovsky is missing.