Ilya Muroets

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.

This disc juxtaposes two significant Russian works for violin and orchestra, each written by a composer with a close relationship to Tchaikovsky, and each dedicated to the great violinist and pedagogue Leopold Auer. These two concertos are both formidable display pieces, designed to show off Auer’s transcendental technique. Ilya Gringolts, acclaimed as one of the great young violin virtuosos of today and lauded for his debut recording on Hyperion, dazzles in this repertoire, ably supported by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov.

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.

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.

Ilya Gringolts plays with a ferocity that – in tandem with taut rhythmic control – adroitly avoids even the slightest hint of frenzy. And yet, for all its intensity and firmness of grip, there’s an equally riveting sense of spontaneity to his playing, too – particularly in Adams’s Concerto, with its intricately variegated, continuous solo part. Gringolts phrases assertively and with such expressive agility that at times in the first movement it sounds as if the violin and orchestra are working independently yet in sync, like separate gears in a great machine.

Although he waited until late in his career to turn to the genre, when Robert Schumann set his mind to compose sonatas for violin, he did so with an incredible flourish of activity. 1851 saw the composition of the Opp. 105 and 121 sonatas (the former being completed in barely a week). Both are models of chamber music collaboration, not virtuosic show pieces for either performer. Rather, Schumann's focus is on delicate melodies, serene interplay between violin and piano, and masterful elaboration of musical gestures. The third sonata is Schumann's completion of the so-called "FAE Sonata," a collaboration with Brahms and Albert Dietrich. This final sonata, only published in 1956, lacks the same cohesiveness and introspection that distinguish the first two sonatas. Still, it offers insight into the flights of musical fancy that characterized Schumann's declining mental health. Performing these three sonatas are violinist Ilya Gringolts and pianist Peter Laul. Gringolts has proven himself to be a master technician many times before, but here – as in his Bach recordings – sensitivity of interpretation is what really draws listeners in here. The seamless interplay he achieves with Laul produces a true sense of dialogue rather than competition. Well-balanced, technically polished, and musically enriching, this album is ideal for those looking for a complete set of these sonatas.

Published in 1733, Pietro Locatelli’s L'Arte del violino for solo violin, strings, and basso continuo took both violin technique and the solo concerto as a genre into a whole new realm. The twelve concertos included in the collection also played a part in forming the image of the violin virtuoso, reaching its full bloom with Paganini towards the end of the century. While the unusually high technical demands of the solo part are obvious to the listener from the start, the great surprise comes at the end of the first and third movements of each of the concertos. Here Locatelli inserts Capriccios for the soloist alone of a difficulty previously unheard of, with a left hand technique making use of extensions, octaves, unprepared tenths, double and triple stopping, arpeggios and double trills.

Throughout his career, Ilya Gringolts has devoted himself to performing contemporary music as well as the great concert repertoire, while also developing a keen interest in historical performance practice. The focus of his latest recital disc is therefore quite logical: music of our own time and its inspiration: Johann Sebastian Bach. The album title is Ciaccona and besides Bach’s iconic composition, Gringolts plays a further two chaconnes – or three if one counts the Ciacconina which opens Heinz Holliger’s brief cycle, composed for Isabelle Faust in 2014.