Kavakos

The Subscription Concert Series of the Wiener Philharmoniker from the Golden Hall of the famous Musikverein are special concerts reserved for subscribers. Due to the exceptional quality of the concerts and the limited offer, the average waiting time for subscribers is more than 10 years. With this series, these very special concerts are made available for the first time audiovisually to a wider audience worldwide. Conductor Herbert Blomstedt, honorary member of the orchestra, is a regular guest at the subscription concerts.

There is a self-selecting audience for this disc. People who want to know what the withdrawn original version of the Violin Concerto of Sibelius will have to hear this recording by violinist Leonidas Kavakos with Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony. Sibelius withdrew the version of the Concerto premiered in 1904 shortened it, tightened it and focused it and premiered a second version in 1905. The revised version became a warhorse in the stable of violin concertos, but the original version disappeared until this world-premiere recording was released in 1990.

Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, and Yo-Yo Ma's new album "Beethoven for Three: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5" erases the border between orchestral and chamber music, presenting two of Beethoven's iconic symphonies in intimate arrangements that maintain the power and immediacy of Beethoven's orchestral works. Beethoven for Three transports listeners to the turn of the nineteenth century, when audiences would have been more familiar with the composer’s music in arrangements for piano trio, string quartet, or piano four hands than for full orchestra. Here, Ax, Kavakos, and Ma seek out the most essential elements of Beethoven's musical language, pairing his second symphony, arranged for trio by Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries, with his fifth — among the most recognizable pieces in western classical music — in a newly-commissioned arrangement by Colin Matthews.

Here's a conundrum: Leonidas Kavakos and Peter Nagy have selected two works each by J.S. Bach and Igor Stravinsky, for what seems a didactic demonstration of both composers' affinity for an objective "musical science"; yet the violinist and pianist deliver these works with so much feeling that their results seem quite subjective, and thereby undermine the presentation.

The founding of the Berliner Philharmoniker on the first of May in 1882, is annually celebrated in an European city of cultural significance. In 2015 the EUROPAKONZERT takes place for the second time after 2004 in Athens, with Leonidas Kavakos joining the Berliner Philharmoniker for the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Bach’s “Largo” from Sonato No. 3. The concert was a smash hit, stunning the audience on site in Athens.The soloist on this recording, Leonidas Kavakos won the ECHO Klassik Award in 2013 as ‘Instrumentalist of the Year’.

This record pairs two composers linked by personal and stylistic association with two performers ideally suited to their music technically and temperamentally. Both composer were attracted to gypsy music, as is shown in the works included here: one early and one late work each.

Collections of encores are commonplace in the recording catalogs, but violinist Leonidas Kavakos comes up with something new here: a collection of showstoppers. With a couple of little Russian tunes from Stravinsky to ramp up, and Fritz Kreisler's arrangement of Dvorák's Humoresque in G flat major, Op. 101, No. 7, to wind things down, the rest is a nonstop cavalcade of extreme violin, with the various national traditions of the great virtuosos (Sarasate, Wieniawski) and composer showpieces (Richard Strauss and, unexpectedly, Benjamin Britten) providing variety.