Gershwin: It Ain't Necessarily So (from Porgy and Bess)

Bryn Terfel, a gentle man in real life, recruits a gang of “bad boy” characters from opera and musicals to serenade us with tunes from the sinister side of the bass clef. Thoroughly convincing as villains you would not want to meet alone in the dark, Bryn Terfel wields a full, wide ranging bass-baritone ever in service to dramatic instincts rare in any era Bad Boys delivers an original concept sure to seduce the media, wow the classical crowd and exert powerful mass appeal. No singer morphs from Don Giovanni to Mack the Knife to Sweeney Todd with Terfel’s devilish ease – Bad Boys is a delightful box of mixed (dark) musical bonbons

Trio Solisti's debut disc on Bridge Records, Café Music, is a programme full of high spirits. The disc begins with Piazzolla's Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, in an arrangement by José Bragato and Trio Solisti’s violinist Maria Bachmann. Schoenfield's Café Music continues the disc's mix of popular and classical, followed by Joaquin Turina's soulful Trio No.2. The disc comes to a close with Maria Bachmann's arrangement of Gershwin's It Ain't Necessarily So.

Whether playing a popular program like the one heard, or playing cutting edge new music, Trio Solisti has earned a reputation for its passionate, committed and adventurous programming.

Hailed by the international media as “a massive talent with astonishing dynamic and expressive range…,” Chuanyun Li is one of the foremost violinists of his generation from China and internationally. An active member of the Yip’s Children Arts Centre since 1986, he has studied under the sponsorship of entrepreneur Mr Choi Kin Chung with Professor Yaoji Lin from Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and won numerous prizes, including the 1st Prize in the 5th Wieniawski International Youth Violin Competition at 11. He studied with Dorothy DeLay, Itzhak Perlman and Hyo Kang in the Juilliard School of Music and continued his studies with DeLay and Kurt Sassmannshaus at the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and with Joey Corpus in New York City with the support of the Clarisse B Kampel Foundation. Li has toured extensively in China, Japan and the US and collaborated with such orchestras as the Rotterdam Philharmonic with Valery Gergiev, Detroit Symphony with Neemi Järvi, Hong Kong Philharmonic with Edo de Waart, Queensland Symphony Orchestra with Michael Christie, China National Symphony with Xincao Li and Singapore Symphony with Lan Shui, among others. Hänssler Classic is proud to present the first recording of this exciting young artist to be made available outside of China.