Wieniawski

Fanya Lin, Polish Wieniawski Philharmonic Orchestra & Theodore Kuchar - Rhapsodic (2023)
WEB FLAC (tracks) - 185 Mb | MP3 CBR 320 kbps - 99 Mb | 00:43:15
Classical | Label: Navona Records

Pianist Fanya Lin’s RHAPSODIC is a masterful exploration of two of the most iconic pieces in piano repertoire. With her deft touch and nuanced interpretation, Lin lends an entirely new dimension to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations.

Wieniawski's scintillating works are played with brilliance and great musical charm here by Perlman and Sanders (piano) for the duets, and Ozawa conducting the LPO for the concertos. It is somtimes said that Perlman's playing has often been recorded too "forward", so one can hear the "between the notes" bowing sounds when he plays.

Milena Wilke was born in Freiburg in Breisgau in 1996. She won first place in the Ton und Erklärung competition (Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft) 2016 in Berlin and won several other prizes in competitions on both national and international level. In 2017, she was awarded a scholarship by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes und des Richard-Wagner-Verbands Konstanz and was additionally welcomed in the organization Yehudi Menuhin, Live Music Now. For this new release, together with Tatiana Chernichka she has recorded several works for violin and piano and she also has written two pieces herself.

Wieniawski’s notorious F sharp minor Concerto, with its perilous opening chain of consecutive tenths, was for a long time the preserve of the few brave enough to take it on, most notably Michael Rabin, Itzhak Perlman, Midori and Gil Shaham. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest and this latest release from Soo-Hyun Park, whose various mentors include Dora Schwarzberg, is also extremely accomplished. If the aforementioned swash their virtuoso buckles imposingly, Park places the emphasis on velvet-toned lyricism rather than pyrotechnical histrionics. She also plays with an unusually wide dynamic range, drawing the listener in with her imaginative phrasing, preferring the elegant poise of a fencing champion to piratical cut and thrust.

Like his more famous compatriot Krzysztof Penderecki, Poland's Krzysztof Meyer experimented freely with avant-garde musical techniques early in his career before evolving towards more traditional yet still complex and challenging compositional parameters. While he has compiled a large and impressive body of orchestral and vocal work, I find his chamber music most compelling, especially his 12 string quartets, which I rate among the best written during the past four decades.

This new release from DUX presents two 19th-century symphonies of two Polish composers belonging to two different generations, so far almost unknown.

Hamish Milne makes a welcome return to the Romantic Piano Concerto series with two recherché delights from the nineteenth century.
Józef, ‘the other Wieniawski’ is the brother of the more famous violinist, Henryk. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire and had a wide-ranging and successful performing and composing career. His highly attractive Piano Concerto in G minor is in the mould of those by Chopin and Liszt, with the piano very much in the foreground. The Rondo finale demands a spectacular display of technique, living proof of Wieniawski’s own brand of virtuosity.

Wieniawski is one of those Romantic composers beloved of violinists and tolerated by everyone else. Judging from the number of performances and recordings, his music’s allure is fading fast, which is a pity because much of what he wrote is very attractive and at least entertaining. This is particularly true of the Fantaisie brillante on Gounod’s Faust, full of good tunes and effective contrasts. Violinist Vadim Brodski has orchestrated the piece very idiomatically in the best sense: it’s actually better sounding than Wieniawski’s own symphonic writing.

Charles Roland Berry, born in Boston, Mass., in 1957, studied in California with Peter Racine Fricker and Paul Creston before supporting himself in a variety of jobs in the music world. As a composer, he believes in writing music that audiences might like to hear and musicians enjoy playing; as a result, all three works here have the open-air, open-hearted, even naïve, quality of much American orchestral music, film scores in particular – the kind of ‘Big Country’ sound that one can hear in Copland, Grofe, Harris, Moross and other painters of the wide outdoors.