Ilya Muroets

Following the chamber music album “leggiero, pesante”, the orchestral “Metamusik/Postludium”, and the “Requiem for Larissa”, ECM New Series is pleased to present a most remarkable recording of Valentin Silvestrov’s “Stille Lieder”, a song cycle of great importance in the development and perception of the Ukrainian composer’s work, in a double album that also includes the premiere recording of his “Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam”.“We may feel we have always known these songs,” writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes to the “Silent Songs”, “and in a sense we have.

Ilya Gringolts made a splash with his CD of the Paganini D Major Concerto, so it's no surprise that he excels in these fiendishly difficult solo pieces, including one of his own. His playing is dazzling, secure even in the most tortuous passages. The Hindemith sonatas are abstract, anti-Romantic works.

The music of Michael Jarrell has been said to ‘examine states of dream and unreality, searching for a moment of truth’ – a truth which is often found in the lowest sonorities and slowest tempi, a place where time stands still. His works are often interrelated, not only by a certain sensitivity or a distinctive tone, but also by the recurrence of particular features that he reworks in different contexts.

Ilya Gringolts made a splash with his CD of the Paganini D Major Concerto, so it's no surprise that he excels in these fiendishly difficult solo pieces, including one of his own. His playing is dazzling, secure even in the most tortuous passages. The Hindemith sonatas are abstract, anti-Romantic works.

Ilya Kaler is a Russian virtuoso, a pupil of Leonid Kogan. He's a first-rate fiddler and an excellent musician. Paganini's once fiendish pyrotechnics hold no terrors for him, not even the whistling harmonics, and how nicely he can turn an Italianate lyrical phrase, as in the secondary theme of the first movement of the First Concerto. Then he can set off with panache into a flying staccato, bouncing his bow neatly on the strings when articulating the delicious spiccato finales of both works. Stephen Gunzenhauser launches into the opening movements with plenty of energy and aplomb and is a sympathetic accompanist throughout.

Kaler's playing of these Romantic sweetly-tuned works is excellent.

Despite the rather numerous and diverse orchestral line-up, the idea of concertare has a more chamber-like character here. The soloist is usually not directly confronted with the massive sound of a full orchestral tutti, but rather is involved in dialogues and interactions with small groups of instruments. With exceptional naturalness, André Tchaikowsky managed to achieve in this concerto a balance between solo violin and a full-scale symphony orchestra, employing textures of a linear, quasi-polyphonic character – enriched, however, by intense and refined harmony and contrapuntal devices drawing on the Baroque tradition.

Gone are the days when the Dvorak Violin Concerto was neglected on disc. Among the 20-odd rival recordings listed in the catalogue there are many outstanding versions, including at least one, Tasmin Little's on CfP, at bargain price. Naxos now offer another, with the Dvorak Concerto generously coupled not only with the Romance (often the only extra on recordings of this work) but with another high-romantic, Slavonic violin concerto, the Glazunov. The disc makes an outstanding bargain despite some reservations.