Vadim Gluzman

Vadim Gluzman here presents his newest project for BIS: a disc combining two partitas by J.S. Bach with two works by Eugène Ysaÿe and Lera Auerbach.

The Partita No.2 was described as ‘one of the most wonderful, most incomprehensible pieces of music’ by Brahms, and is followed on the disc by Auerbach’s par.ti.ta, composed specifically for Vadim Gluzman.

In Ysaÿe‘s Sonata in A minor the parallels with the Partita No.3 are very strong. It was composed in 1924 as the second of a set of six, each sonata dedicated to a fellow violin virtuoso, and although the affinity is obvious, he incorporates elements wholly alien to Bach.

Vadim Gluzman’s previous discs on BIS have ranged from solo works and chamber music by Lera Auerbach, Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke, to the great violin concertos by Bruch and Tchaikovsky.

BIS here present a substantial addition to Sofia Gubaidulina’s discography to coincide with her 80th birthday.

Her music is intimately connected to her religious and philosophical beliefs. In the violin concerto In tempus praesens the numbers 1 and 3 – derived from the Holy Trinity – play an important role, as well as the concept of ‘Sophia’, implying divine wisdom and the creative power of God. The soloist here is Vadim Gluzman.

Another pillar of Gubaidulina’s musical thinking is rhythm, and this disc features her most recent work for percussion: Glorious Percussion received its first performance in 2008 by an international group of eminent percussionists adopting the work’s title as its name. In this world première recording of the work, the ensemble appears with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra under Jonathan Nott.

Following on from his recordings of the concertos by Tchaikovsky (‘without doubt one of the work's finest recordings in recent years’, BBC Music Magazine), Barber and Korngold, The virtuosic violinist Vadim Gluzman here performs a giant of the violin repertoire: Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.1.

Throughout his 82-year life, Bruch remained true to the musical ideals of his youth, formed by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and German folk songs. His Violin Concerto No. 1 was a spectacular success from its first performance in 1868, and soon won over audiences both in Germany and abroad.

Gluzman also performs the violin version of the Romance in F major, Op.85, composed by Bruch for viola and orchestra. The composer also made an arrangement for violin and piano, and it is this violin part which Gluzman performs to the original orchestral score.

Closing the programme is the String Quintet in A minor in which Gluzman is joined by four eminent string players: Sandis Šteinbergs, Maxim Rysanov, Ilze Klava and Reinis Birznieks. Composed in 1918, the youthful energy, dramatic instinct and playful exuberance of the quintet equally belies the fact that it was composed by a man in his eightieth year.

Gluzman is supported by the eminent Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director Andrew Litton.

Vadim Gluzman has enraptured listeners on several BIS discs, including his acclaimed double-bill of Tchaikovsky’s and Glazunov’s violin concertos. Strad Magazine remarked Gluzman’s ‘honeyed tone’ recreating ‘that innate Russian musicality of a previous generation...’ On the present disc Vadim Gluzman performs works for violin and orchestra composed in the three years following the end of World War II, by two composers whose fates were very different. Exiled from his native Austria, Erich Korngold became a celebrated composer of film music in Hollywood – and in his Violin Concerto in D major reused a number of themes from different films. Balys Dvarionas, is even today barely known outside his native Lithuania, even though his Violin Concerto in B minor was taken up by the legendary David Oistrakh. But the two men are united in their music’s heartfelt and unabashed romanticism – a romanticism which Vadim Gluzman is perfectly placed to convey.

The three works for violin and orchestra gathered here testify both to the versatility of Vadim Gluzman as a performer and to the richness and variety of the influences at play in American music during the 20th century. Like the text by Plato which inspired it, Bernstein's Serenade, from 1954, is a series of statements in praise of love. Musically it is typical of its maker, with allusions both to his own music and to works by Bartók, Mendelssohn and Stravinsky, and with a hint of jazz in the finale. Composed some thirty years earlier, Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem turns to the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, dealing specifically with aspects of the Chassidic movement. Its second movement, Nigun (Improvisation) is probably Bloch's most famous work for the violin, an attempt to recreate the ecstasy generated by fervent religious singing. Samuel Barber, on the other hand, was deeply fascinated by the music of J.S. Bach and Brahms, although this is not always obvious in his music. His Violin Concerto, which he began to compose in Switzerland in 1939, while war was breaking out in Europe, has been described as having 'a chastened and aristocratic classic style'. That violinist Vadim Gluzman possesses the musical convictions and the supreme command of his instrument to do justice to all of these works will be clear to anyone who has encountered his previous concerto disc, with works by Tchaikovsky and Glazunov. The recipient of numerous distinctions, it was glowingly reviewed, for instance in International Record Review: 'The variety of tone, lithe, sinuous and febrile ... is truly exceptional.' Gluzman is here supported by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) under John Neschling, a team that has demonstrated its versatility on a number of recordings ranging from Villa-Lobos' Choros to Liszt's piano concertos.

The disc opens and closes with the works by two Austrian composers forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish heritage. Schoenberg composed his setting of the Jewish prayer Kol Nidre in 1938 for the Los Angeles synagogue, and in 1944 the same congregation commissioned a new setting of Psalm 92 from Erich Zeisl. Soon after the commission Zeisl received the tragic news of the death of his father and several friends in the Holocaust. Framed by these two vocal works are two purely instrumental ones: Bernstein’s Halil (from the Hebrew word for flute) was dedicated to Yadin Tannenbaum, a young Israeli soldier and flautist who was killed in 1973 in his tank in Sinai, while Ernest Bloch wrote his Baal Shem in memory of his mother. The vibrant music is performed by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and conductor John Neschling (incidentally Schoenberg’s grandson).

Following on from his Tchaikovsky and Glazunov violin concertos disc, Vadim Gluzman now presents a disc of virtuoso violin music by a range of different composers with a sparkling programme fit for any of those virtuosos of days gone by. Indeed, several of them appear in the list of contents in the unaccustomed roles of composer or arranger: Heifetz himself has arranged Fairy Tale, by Medtner, while Szeryng’s version of Halffter’s Habanera receives its world première recording with this release. Other examples of virtuoso-turned-composer are Wieniawski, Francescatti (with a Polka) and Kreisler, whose La Gitana fits into the tradition of virtuoso pieces inspired by gypsy music – a tradition of which Ravel’s Tzigane is of course the jewel.

Here Gluzman performs with Angela Yoffe, his regular duo partner as well as his wife. This well-matched pair has been admired by the reviewers for their intense, passionate and powerful performances as well as for their supreme command of their respective instruments. On their first disc on BIS the reviewer on website Classics Today wrote: ‘Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe push their collective virtuosity sky-high’.