Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz 112

Thomas Zehetmair was taught by his father and made his debut at the Salzburg Festival when he was 16, in 1977. The following year, he won first prize in the International Mozart Competition. He has built up an international career and has performed chamber music with Alfred Brendel, Heinrich Schiff and Tabea Zimmermann.

This well-filled 2CD set – nearly 2 hours and 40 minutes long – presents Bartók’s major concertos (the Viola Concerto appears on another Eloquence CD released this month). The three Piano Concertos appear in muscular and sumptuously recorded performances (one of the finest examples of Decca’s 1970s engineering at the venerated Kingsway Hall) by Pascal Rogé and Walter Weller. Likewise, the Second Violin Concerto resurrects a long-buried 1980 Argo recording by the late Iona Brown, with none other than Sir Simon Rattle conducting. The First Violin Concerto, the result of an ultimately called-off love affair with Stefi Geyer, found its music rechannelled into the Two Portraits and in Kyung Wha Chung and Chantal Juillet, respectively, find two of the composer’s most persuasive advocates.

“Iona Brown gives a clean-cut and stylish performance, superbly recorded” Penguin Guide

Acclaimed as “a player of impressive authority and presence” (The Strad), and “one of the top violinists of tomorrow” (Diapason), at the age of 21 Belgian born Yossif Ivanov has an impressive list of musical prizes and concert appearances. When he was only 16 he won the First Prize at the Montreal International Music Competition, followed two years later by a Second Prize, as well as the Prize of the Public at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. Yossif Ivanov was named as the Echo Rising Star by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for the 2005-6 season, and as part of that prize, performed a recital tour, which included amongst others Carnegie Hall, Musikverein Vienna, Concertgebouw Amsterdam and Symphony Hall Birmingham. In April 2007, he made his highly acclaimed debut in London, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Marin Alsop. Yossif has studied with Zakhar Bron in Lübeck, Igor & Valery Oistrakh at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, and with Augustin Dumay at the Queen Elisabeth College of Music. In 2006 Yossif Ivanov’s first CD on the Ambroisie/Naïve label of sonatas by Franck, Ysaÿe and D’Haene, was awarded a Diapason d’Or de l’Année, the most important record industry award in France.

Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto was originally written during 1947 and 1948. He was still working on the piece at the time of the Zhdanov decree, and in the period following the composer's denunciation the work could not be performed. It was finally premiered by its dedicatee David Oistrakh on 29 October 1955 with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky. The work has a dark brooding central core and is in many ways a musical representation of the composer’s uneasy relationship with the state. Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2 was written between 1937and 1938 and dedicated to the Hungarian violin virtuoso, Zoltán Székely. Although he was filled with serious concern about the growing strength of fascism at the time, the composition is generally lyrical and optimistic in tone. It was was premiered by Székely at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam on March 23, 1939 with Willem Mengelberg conducting the Concertgebouw orchestra.

Producer: Mark Obert-Thorn

Yehudi Menuhin commissioned and gave the first performance of Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin and was an influential advocate of his music.

This 1947 recording of the First Violin Sonata finds Menuhin in particularly intense and vivid form, his accomplishment equalled by Adolph Baller’s virtuosity and perceptive musicianship.

Of the four studio recordings Menuhin made of the composer’s Second Violin Concerto, this 1953 rendition, while perhaps not flawless, certainly remains an unusually truthful and penetrating account of one of the twentieth century’s most magnificent, challenging and emotionally satisfying violin concertos.