Sarasate: El canto del ruiseñor, Op. 29 (The Song of the Nightingale)

Dazzlingly virtuosic fireworks, spirited passion and astonishing technique combine in the youthful Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang who leaves the critics grasping for superlatives whenever she plays.

In this second volume of Naxos’s cycle of Sarasate’s complete works for violin and orchestra she again teams with the orchestra founded by the legendary Spanish violinist-composer in 1879 to present two of his orchestral masterpieces, the famous Carmen Fantasy and the sadly neglected Romeo and Juliet Fantasy, as well as several other utterly delightful, and fiendishly difficult, concert pieces.

Violinists Adele Anthony and Gil Shaham share many passions. Along with their personal connection (they are married) and careers as performing artists, they both feel a deep affinity for the music of Sarasate. This legendary violinist and composer’s inspired works are enormously entertaining and irresistibly appealing, eloquently summarised by Adele as ‘works being a culmination of melody, violinistic idiom and elegance, often evocative of his native Spain’. Gil rates him ‘as one of my great personal heroes. He was a meticulous composer; his style was always full of imagination, full of melody, always perfectly clean and concise. I love this guy.’

Adele and Gil used the occasion of Sarasate’s centenary in 2008 to pay tribute to the revered master’s work. This included a concert at the Lincoln Center in New York, broadcast live on PBS in North America and to end the year’s festivities ¡Sarasateada!, an all Sarasate Festival in Valladolid, in Sarasate’s native Spain.

¡Sarasateada! included both chamber and orchestral concerts from which this release is born and this disc captures the expected and unexpected. A red blooded live performance of Camen Fantasy, Zapateado the raucous cowboy dance and Zigeunerweisen, all works which have challenged violinists for decades and never fail to dazzle. The unexpected works are some wonderful yet lesser known - Song of the Nightingale, Airs Eccosaise showing the his compositional gift, ‘his diversity and imagination’ as Adele puts it, with the disc concluding with a delightful and stratospheric duo Navarra, a folk song derived from Navarre in Spain.