Sarasate: Danza Española No. 3: Romanza Andaluza, Op. 22, No. 1

Over four days of sessions in Hollywood during 1946 and 1947, Jascha Heifetz and his regular accompanist Emanuel Bay recorded this evocative series of encores. The repertoire was wide-ranging, and included three Spanish pieces by Sarasate, Nin and Ernesto Halffter, all delectably played, in his only recordings of them. He turned also to his own transcription of Bax’s Mediterranean as well as to staples such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s dazzling Flight of The Bumble-Bee. Throughout, Heifetz’s bowing, pizzicati, double stops, glissandi and inimitable portamenti grace these pieces with incredible freshness.

Mark Obert-Thorn, reissue producer and audio restoration engineer

Michaela Paetsch Neftel and Wieslaw Pipczynski perform favourites from the virtuosic violin repertoire including Vitali's Chaconne, Paganini's Campanella, Kreisler's Liebeslied and Sarasate's Carmen Fantasy. All are excellently suited to an accordion accompaniment.

Gernot Winischofer studied in Vienna, Salzburg and at the Moscow Conservatory. He is currently a professor at the Vienna Conservatory. The Spanish pianist Anna Ferrer is an international artist and has performed with many prestigious orchestras. Here they bring their talents to a programme with a Spanish theme.

Radulovic’s recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto received excellent reviews: “Radulovic (taped live) soars aloft in these glorious pieces with a seamless purity guaranteed to set the heart fluttering and pulse racing.” Classic FM Magazine. This new CD is selling 200 copies per day in France and is receiving fantastic reviews in the French Music press.

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.

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.