Grieg: Violin Sonata No. 3 in C minor, Op. 45

This fascinating recording brings two contrasting composers together, linked by their 3rd violin and piano sonatas. Grieg’s third and final violin sonata was finished in January 1887, dedicated to the German painter Franz Lenbach. Medtner’s 3rd sonata was also his last one and this was dedicated to his brother Emil, completed in 1938 and premiered the following year at the Aeolian Hall, London by the violinist Arthur Catterall and Medtner himself at the piano.

World Première Recordings

Orchestrated by Henning Kraggerud and Bernt Simen Lund

Grieg is one of the world’s best known composers, but the three Violin Sonatas are a relatively unfamiliar part of his output, despite being among his own favourite pieces. Grieg never wrote a violin concerto, and the foremost Norwegian violinist of his generation, Henning Kraggerud, assisted by Bernt Simen Lund, a member of the Tromsø Chamber Orchestra, has taken up the challenge of creating three new concertos from the sonatas. In these arrangements the solo violin is set against a string orchestra augmented by wind instruments in order to retain the feel of chamber music.

Melodiya presents a unique album of violin sonatas of Edvard Grieg and Ludwig van Beethoven, and a duet for violin and piano of Franz Schubert performed by Kreisler and Rachmaninoff. The recordings were made in the 1928 in the United States.

It is probably difficult to think of another ensemble of the same scale where each of the partners is a great musician who has reached the pinnacle of perfection in his art and a composer with his own unique style.

Audio Blu-ray + Hybrid SACD

In 2007, conductor Rolf Gupta gave the first Norwegian performance of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor with the legendary Australian pianist Percy Grainger as the posthumous soloist. On this recording the orchestra accompanies Grainger’s original interpretation of the concerto, also included are a handful of Grieg’s Lyric pieces performed by the composer himself and brought to live by modern technology. Astonishingly, these performances have not been available in any format until now.

Albanian violinist Rudens Turku brings together works by Dvorák , Grieg, Rachmaninov, Piazolla and Sarasate, who each created unique musical homages to their respective homelands.

Albanian violinist Rudens Turku returns for his third recording for Avie, with ‘Homelands’. Rudens brings together composers who each created unique musical evocations of their native countries. All were world travellers who found through their compositions the means to produce striking homages to their respective lands, from iconic Sonatas by Dvorák and Grieg to Rachmaninov’s exquisite Vocalise to lesser known works by a young Astor Piazzolla and the Spanish virtuoso Pablo Sarasate.

Although Grieg and Elgar did not physically cross paths (they neither met nor corresponded), there are enough biographical and musical parallels to beg the question as to why the relationship between them has been largely overlooked. It is these points of contact that makes the combination of these two works on this recording particularly apposite. One has only to consider the similarity in their status not merely as ‘nationalistic composers’ but as important national figures. There are also various biographical parallels: they shared several mutual friends of whom the English composer Frederick Delius is the most notable, Elgar received an honorary doctorate at Oxford University in 1905, Grieg received the same award a year later; during the first orchestral broadcast of Elgar’s music in 1923, the accompanying piece in the program was Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. Quite apart from these historical parallels there are many mutual points of contact in their compositions, particularly in the case of the two sonatas performed on this CD, one being that the completion of both sonatas coincided with a distancing of their respective writers from the musical nationalism for which they were most associated

This is the second AVIE recording by the powerful, Barcelona-based violin-piano duo of Kai Gleusteen and Catherine Ordronneau in Avie’s Crear Classics series, named for the spectacular studio space on the western coast of Scotland. Their debut recital of works by Janácek, Prokofiev and Shostakovich (AV 0023) was critically acclaimed and caught the attention of music aficionados worldwide. This release features three contrasting yet complimentary works from the second half of the 19th century.