Brahms: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 - CD

Following her critically hailed Deutsche Grammophon debut, Echoes of Time – and growing acclaim for her concert appearances – violin virtuosa Lisa Batiashvili meets every challenge of Brahms’s monumental Violin Concerto.

With maestro Christian Thielemann and the instrumentalists of the Staatskapelle Dresden, for whom German Romanticism is the birthright, Lisa Batiashvili’s elegant, eloquent artistry finds ideal partners. Meeting Thielemann exceeded all her expectations: “. . .his conducting was wild and fiery. At the same time I always had the feeling that I was being supported by the orchestra and that I had time to react.”

Rounding out the programme are Clara Schumann chamber pieces which Batiashvili plays together with young pianist Alice Sara Ott. For the first time in their careers they teamed up to play the three romances.

I’ve long dreamed of playing with the Wiener Philharmoniker,” said violinist Renaud Capuçon in 2011, and his dream has come true with this recording of two concerto masterpieces of the Austro-German repertoire: the Brahms and the Berg, composed almost 50 years apart. The conductor is Daniel Harding, who has built a close relationship the legendary Viennese orchestra.

Renaud Capuçon, the leading French violinist of his generation, joins the British conductor Daniel Harding and the august Wiener Philharmoniker for two landmark concertos of the Austro-German repertoire. The expansive Brahms concerto, first performed in 1878 by Joseph Joachim, is a peak of the composer’s glowingly warm Romanticism, while the Berg concerto – written in 1935, the last year of Berg’s life, and dedicated to the memory of Manon Gropius, who had died aged just 19 – poignantly blends the atonality of the Second Viennese School with subtle lyricism and, in its second movement, a haunting Bach chorale.

The contrast between the two works echoes the programme of Capuçon’s 2009 Virgin Classics release of the Beethoven and Korngold concertos, described by BBC Music as “a beautiful and appropriate pairing” and “perfect choices for Capuçon’s elegantly understated delivery”. In 2011, after a US performance of the Korngold –composed 10 years after the Berg and a more extrovert offshoot of the Austro-German tradition – the Chicago Tribune praised Capuçon’s “panache, sensitivity and sizzling virtuosity” and “the rich, penetrating sound he drew from his instrument, a 1737 Guarneri del Gesù once belonging to Isaac Stern”.

“I’ve long dreamed of playing with the Wiener Philharmoniker, which is of course one of the world’s most extraordinary orchestras,” said Capuçon in an interview in October 2011. “I’m going to record with them in December, so that will be a dream come true!” This release is the fruit of those recording sessions. Harding made his debut with the legendary Viennese orchestra in 2004, when he was not yet 30, and has since built up a close relationship with its players. Describing the conductor’s approach to Brahms, The Guardian has written that: “Harding is immaculate in his ability to negotiate the complex relationship between feeling and form.”

Capuçon, meanwhile, has pronounced Brahms one of his favourite composers, “for his serenity and the sense of resurrection that he conveys”. His Virgin Classics recording of Brahms chamber works, with his cellist brother Gautier and the pianist Nicholas Angelich was described by Gramophone as “sure to kindle anyone's enthusiasm for Brahms. Warm, beautifully balanced tone stresses the composer's romantic side, as does the expansive phrasing. There's a feeling of spontaneity, too, as though each player is discovering new aspects to the music while recording it.”

Two great milestones in the discography of Frank Peter Zimmermann, one of the finest of German violin virtuosi. Graceful elegance marks his Mozart interpretations, while his Brahms is all virtuoso fire and dreamy, Romantic rapture.

This collection of recordings illuminates two different sides of violinist Tasmin Little’s accomplished playing. While the Brahms and Sibelius Concertos are a testament to her technical skill and breadth of expression, the Pärt works display a more pared-back approach, making full use of Little’s pure and resonant tone.

Baiba Skride is not just one of the most sought-after artists when it comes to finding a soloist for one of the great violin concertos. She is also much in demand for chamber music. This makes her ideal for her new recording, her first on the ORFEO label, devoted to the work of Johannes Brahms. It is a highly promising start to our collaboration with this First-Prize winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2001. Besides Brahms’s Violin Concerto, she here offers his Hungarian Dances in the version for violin and piano made by Joseph Joachim. The long-standing musical partnership of Brahms and Joachim is reflected doubly here, for Joachim was also the dedicatee of the Concerto. Baiba Skride’s Brahms interpretations are themselves characterized by happy musical constellations. In Sakari Oramo she has a conductor who is himself a violinist and who offers the appropriate momentum with the Royal Philharmonic in Stockholm. One clearly hears the energy and vigour with which every instrumental grouping plays. Thus the great arch of the work is perfectly formed, from the solo interjections (not just from the violin!) to the symphonic dialogue between the partners. The chamber-music intimacy of the Hungarian Dances could not be achieved more powerfully or more beautifully than in Baiba Skride’s tried-and-tested duo partnership with her sister Lauma Skride at the piano. Unhindered by the “pianistic” violin part with its many double stoppings, Baiba develops an ensemble that is in tempo and in its gestures carefully moulded with the piano. The piano may have what is clearly an accompanying part, and Lauma Skride certainly adapts to her sister’s playing in an unpretentious manner, but nor is her part understated. The result is a performance of these atmospheric dances that is at times resilient and fiery, at other times melodic, gentle and smooth. They belong just as much to Brahms’s art as do the formal stringency and unity we find in his large-scale works – and it is all the lovelier when we find all of this on a single CD recording.

The Violin Concerto by Johannes Brahms is for performers and audience alike one of the loveliest, most challenging examples of the genre. It was with this work that Arabella Steinbacher gave her debut in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein in December 2007, the same hall where the composer himself had conducted on occasion. Arabella Steinbacher’s debut was accompanied by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor Fabio Luisi, who are also to be heard on this live recording in Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. Both this symphony and the Brahms concerto were dedicated to the leading violin virtuoso of the second half of the 19th century, namely Joseph Joachim. The work soon began a triumphal procession through the concert halls. Thanks to Joachim’s numerous famed successors, it would be impossible to imagine the violin repertoire today without it.

Arabella Steinbacher won the Joachim Violin Competition in Hanover several years ago, which was a starting point of her current international career. She is furthermore a worthy representative of the violin style that is celebrated in Brahms’s concerto, a style that is virtuosic without virtuosity becoming an end in itself. Thanks to her much-praised brilliant, precise tone, the listener remains aware throughout that the solo part never recedes completely into the background, even where the orchestra unfolds its most expansive symphonic arguments – such as in the presentation of the work’s themes and in the sensitive orchestration of the first and second movements. Arabella Steinbacher fully savours the works’ variety of colour and climax. In the brilliant cadenza of the first movement and in the highly spirited third, she draws on an embarrassment of virtuosic riches which is masterly.

The booklet of Isabelle Faust’s new recording includes an essay written by her regarding the performing editions used and the significance of the violinist Joseph Joachim in the string works of Johannes Brahms, as seen from a performer’s point of view. Since Brahms did not belong to a generation of composers who mastered several different instruments – as had Bach or Mozart – and composed from the perspective of a pianist, his exchange of ideas with Joachim, which in the case of the Violin Concerto lasted almost a year, was of decisive importance for the final form of the piece, one of the most difficult in the repertoire. Isabelle uses the rarely played cadenza by Ferruccio Busoni, which dates from 1913. Brahms got to know Busoni as a child prodigy and recommended the young pianist in a number of artistic circles: ‘What Schumann did for me, I will do for Busoni.’ The spirit of Joseph Joachim also hovers over the second work on this recording, for the composer regarded the violinist as his most important adviser in the realm of chamber music too. In the case of his Sextet, however, the most perceptible influence is that of the doomed love affair between the composer and the soprano Agathe von Siebold. That Brahms was unable to overcome their separation with a light heart is clear from the monument in sound to his lost romance in the lyrical second theme of the first movement. ‘A-GA- D/H-E’1 proclaims the sequence of notes making up the motif (bars 162 ff). Isabelle generously credits Christopher Hogwood, Robert Pascall, Stefan Weymar and Douglas Woodfull-Harris for their active support in all questions relating to the manuscript and the first edition of Op.36 and for generously making available a prepublication copy of the new Bärenreiter edition. Gramophone Magazine gave Isabelle Faust its Young Artist of the Year Award for her first recording of sonatas by Béla Bartók, in 1997 [now reissued on hm gold with volume 2].

The year 2010 marked a new stage in her recording career: Diapason voted her CD of Bach Partitas and Sonatas a Diapason d’Or of the Year, while her complete set of the Beethoven Sonatas with Alexander Melnikov, received the Gramophone Award for Best Chamber Recording. Composed of around 40 musicians from 20 different nations, and independent of external sponsorship, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1997 by the players themselves and Claudio Abbado. In 1998, at the age of 22, Daniel Harding became Principal Guest Conductor; in 2003 he was named Music Director and he has served as Principal Conductor since 2008, conducting around a quarter of the orchestra’s projects each season. He is also Music Director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the LSO and Music Partner of the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra.

“a poetic player with an irresistibly warm sound, a tightly controlled vibrato and an athletic technique." BBC Music Magazine