Violin For Children

Mathieu van Bellen and Mathias Halvorsen present an ambitious and first ever completly instrumental arrangement of Giaccomo Puccini’s entire opera La Bohème. The musicians have arranged the score themselves, bringing together the parts of the soloists, the choir and the orchestra into a hyper-virtuosic piece for just violin and piano. Recorded live in front of an audience, van Bellen and Halvorsen give everything they have; bringing forth each scene in an expressive and highly evocative tour de force.

RCA Victor's The American Album is the most daring and ambitious program undertaken by violinist Anne Akiko Meyers for RCA Victor and features some of the most challenging and invigorating music to be found among her early playing. The showpiece here is Meyers' rendering of Charles Ives' Sonata No. 4 "Children's Day at the Camp Meeting," in which she transits seamlessly from the elementary, student-like playing at the opening through the fierce transcendentalism in the middle section to the whimsical, scherzo-like final movement. Meyers' playing matches Ives' rub-your-head-while-you-pat-your-tummy requirements without losing her sense of line or even tonal beauty.

This is a CD/DVD box set that contains a wonderful 32 page booklet in which you can read how about this Tolkien inspired dark concept story (taken from the book Silmarillion). The music is performed by musicians who use a wide range of instruments, from harp, violin, French horn, clarinet and flute to keyboards and many male and female singers like a bass bariton. The amount of classical instruments is a strong indication what we can expect from Ainur during the 13 songs on Children Of Hurin…

KOMITAS was one of the first Armenian musicians to undergo classical Western musical training, in Berlin, in addition to music education in his own country. He published both folksong collections and writings on Armenian church melodies, and his work laid the foundations for the development of a clearly defined national musical style. The Seven Folk Dances evoke the specific timbres of Armenian instruments, the Seven Songs for Piano are fleeting and lyrical while the Twelve Children’s Pieces based on folk-themes are beautifully crisp. Msho-Shoror is one of the most ancient of all Armenian dances.

David Oistrakh is considered the premiere violinist of mid-20th century Soviet Union. His recorded legacy includes nearly the entire standard violin repertory up to and including Prokofiev and Bartók. Oistrakh's violin studies began in 1913 with famed teacher Pyotr Stolyarsky. Later he officially joined Stolyarsky's class at the Odessa Conservatory, graduating in 1926 by playing Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto.

Dvorák's music for violin and piano comes from many periods in his career. An early Sonata in A minor of 1873 is lost. Of the works which do survive, several, including the Notturno and Four Romantic Pieces, are skilful arrangements of earlier works (the Notturno is a reworking of the central section of the E minor String Quartet, while the Four Pieces were originally written for viola and piano).

Won’t nearly an hour and three quarters of music for violin and piano by the same composer be too monotonous? No it won’t because it is Dvořák… Dvořák never repeated himself; in every work, he created a different musical world. It would be hard to find another composer capable of such diversity within a single musical genre. After the earliest of the pieces, the Romance, he sent his publisher Simrock the Mazurek, which he dedicated to the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate. The almost meditative Nocturne first appeared in a string quartet and then a quintet before being heard for the first time as an independent piece in arrangements including one for violin and piano.