Violin For Children

The daughter of an artist and a college president, Meyers was born in San Diego, California. Her mother is of Japanese descent. Raised in Southern California, she studied with Shirley Helmick, and then with Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld at the Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles. She then studied with Josef Gingold at Indiana University and Dorothy DeLay, Felix Galimir, and Masao Kawasaki at the Juilliard School in New York City. Combining her junior and senior high school years and graduating early from the Juilliard School at age 20, she began touring internationally and recording exclusively for RCA Red Seal.

Ives tried repeatedly to find a violinist with whom he could play his sonatas, but all such attempts ended in a fiasco. Ives remarked sarcastically about a rehearsal of the Violin Sonata #1 with a German violinist: "The 'Professor' came in and, after a lot of big talk, started to play the first movement of the First Sonata. He didn't even get through the first page. He was all bothered with the rhythms and the notes, and got mad. He said 'This cannot be played. It is awful. It is not music, it makes no sense.' He couldn't get it even after I'd played it over for him several times. I remember he came out of the little back music room with his hands over his ears, and said, 'When you get awfully indigestible food in your stomach that distresses you, you can get rid of it, but I cannot get those horrible sounds out of my ears.'"

from ECM booklet

It seems that Ives derived a lot of pleasure from composing the four violin sonatas written during his mature period of creativity. In general, he wrote most of the "prose" for the piano and most of the "poetry" for the violin. This was one way of resolving the problems that existed in the interaction between the piano and violin. He composed in a lyrical manner, making full use of the violin's natural properties. It seems he developed an entire concept for the uniting of the two instruments. All sections of all of his sonatas, except those in the third, only give tempo indication.

from BVHaast booklet

Jean Sibelius & Magnus Lindberg - Violin Concertos
Lisa Batiashvili, violin / Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra - Sakari Oramo
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 262 MB | Full Artwork: 143 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Sony Classical # 88697129362 | Country/Year: Germany 2007
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic, 21st Century, Violin

…In 2001 Batiashvili appeared in a recording premiere of the Olli Mustonen Concerto for 3 violins, with fellow violinists Jaakko Kuusisto and Pekka Kuusisto, on the Ondine label. Over the next few years her career blossomed with major concert dates across Europe and the U.S. In August 2006 she premiered the Lindberg Concerto at Avery Fisher Hall, with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, Louis Langrée conducting. Batiashvili signed a recording contract with Sony in 2007 and went on to record the Beethoven Violin Concerto for that label and a disc of works by Mozart and Britten. In 2008 Batiashvili gave the premiere in London of the Kancheli double concerto Broken Chant, for violin, oboe, and orchestra, with her husband François Leleux and the BBC Symphony Orchestra…