la Cadenza

Gitlis plays the violin concerti at a faster tempo than most soloists. It doesn't work very well for violin concerto number one, but it completely rocks for concerto number two I absolutely love it! In fact it's my favorite classical work. I can't rave enough about it. He uses his own cadenza which is fantastic. He uses Emile Sauret's cadenza in the first concerto, which I don't like very much too drawn out and long winded. The three Caprices and the I Palpiti are as good as it gets too..

En février 1935 Alban Berg reçoit la commande d'un concerto (pour violon). Deux mois plus tard, Manon, fille d'Alma Mahler et de Walter Gropius, meurt à l'âge de dix-huit ans.(…) (Une) septicémie … l'emportera à la fin de décembre. Prenant la valeur d'un double requiem, le Concerto « A la mémoire d'un ange » suscite une intense émotion lors de sa création, à Barcelone le 19 avril 1936 … Cette partition reste l'oeuvre de la seconde école de Vienne la plus jouée et aimée du grand public. A un portrait gracieux et joyeux de Manon (Andante - Allegretto), succède une musique plus dure incarnant la douleur puis la « transfiguration » (Allegro - Adagio), qu'engendre une citation du choral "Es ist genug". Soutenu par un Georges Prêtre aux petits soins, Christian Ferras en livre en janvier 1963 une vision sensuelle et passionnée, à fleur de peau, vraiment poignante. Le violoniste français domine avec une remarquable aisance la complexité du langage de Berg, dodécaphonique mais émaillé de réminiscences tonales.

Steven Isserlis is a splendid cellist with a consummate technique and a focused, intense tone capable of infinite variety. He's an enterprising, imaginative musician with a penchant for centering programs on a single composer or national idiom. He has recorded French sonatas for Virgin Classics, and for RCA, the works of Mendelssohn, John Taverner, Haydn, and Czech and Russian composers. On his latest CD, Isserlis performs four relatively unfamiliar compositions of Saint-Saëns. Unfortunately, obscure works by a good composer are usually neglected for a reason.

Abandoned at the age of two months and taken in by the Ospedale della Pietà, Chiara (or Chiaretta) rose – within that enclosed charitable institution in Venice – to become one of the leading European violinists of the middle of the 18th century. No stranger to such acclaim himself from two and a half centuries later, Fabio Biondi, on his first release for Glossa, has devised a programme drawing on the personal diary of this remarkable musician – taught by Antonio Vivaldi, and later a virtuoso soloist on the violin as well as the viola d’amore – of concertos and sinfonias by composers who, like the prete rosso, taught at the Pietà: Porta, Porpora, Martinelli, Latilla, Perotti and Bernasconi are all musicians whose compositions charm and delight as much today as they will have done in the time of Chiara.

A treasury of the classical guitar: as a solo and concerto instrument, and as a partner to other instruments, in music from Europe and Latin America that spans five centuries. This box assembles all releases from the ground-breaking series, Panorama de la guitare,which showcased luminaries of the guitar’s ‘new golden age’ in the 1960s and 70s. Most of these recordings are making their first appearance on CD, and all have been remastered from the original tapes in 24bit/96kHz, revealing the sound of the instrument in its true intimacy and beauty.