Violin Themes

Stravinsky’s collaboration with the violinist Samuel Dushkin was a great artistic success, generating new works for the repertoire as well as arrangements of some of the composer’s most tuneful and popular works. Of these arrangements, Dushkin wrote that Stravinsky seemed ‘to go back to the essence of the music and rewrite or recreate the music in the spirit of the new instrument’. Reviewing the current performers in The Independent, Bayan Northcott writes that ‘these are no ordinary transcriptions. In reducing items from The Firebird or The Fairy’s Kiss to the violin and piano medium, Stravinsky rethought and respaced their every chord’.

John Williams and Anne-Sophie Mutter reunite for World Premiere recording of the composer’s Violin Concerto No. 2 alongside three film themes in special new arrangements. Now available as a special single-disc Blu-ray edition of the album featuring all tracks in Pure Audio – also available in Surround and Dolby Atmos – along with films of last summer’s world premiere of the second violin concerto at Tanglewood, together with the artists’ encore performance of “Across the Stars” (from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones); the three film themes in concert from Boston; and a 25‑minute interview with John Williams and Anne-Sophie Mutter at Tanglewood.

Violin on Stage presents selection of exquisite pieces from opera and ballet and features original works and arrangements for violin and orchestra, including dazzling showstoppers.

RecArt presents a new album with chamber music for violin and piano of a distinguished Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg - 20th century creator compared by musicologists to Dimitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. Artist whose tragic fate intertwined with the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution. In recording participated Ewelina Nowicka - violin and Milena Antoniewicz - piano

This new release from DUX presents 20th century works for violin duo by Polish composers, performed here by Polish violinists Marta Gidaszewska and Robert Laguniak. Among the composers whose works we can hear on the album, Grazyna Bacewicz occupies a prominent place. Both her Suite for Two Violins (1943) and Easy Duets on Folk Themes for Two Violins (1945), meant for didactic purposes, charm with Bacewicz's typical precision and clarity of structure and interesting melodies. The Sonatina for Two Violins by Tadeusz Paciorkiewicz also refers to Neoclassicism, although the harmony of the piece is more complex, and its expressive values differ from the subdued emotions typical of that era. The next composition, Michal Spisak's Suite for Two Violins, also deviates from the Neoclassical model; despite its declarative title, it is a mysterious work with the narrative element in the dominant role. The last piece presented, Sonata for Two Violins, is a work by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a Polish composer of Jewish origin whose music is currently being discovered after years of neglect.

This album of Russian violin concertos does what many modern orchestras do when programming concert repertoire. That is, feature one quite famous work (in this case, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto) to draw in more tentative patrons, then throw in a few less well-known but still deserving pieces (in this case, the Arensky and Rimsky-Korsakov). This approach is both effective and appropriate. The programming of these three composers is also historically intelligent; Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were contemporaries, and Arensky was one of Rimsky-Korsakov's many successful students.