Williams, John: Schindler's List - theme

Best-selling Scottish virtuoso Nicola Benedetti moves dramatically from the 18th-century world of Italia to the 20th-century world of cinema.

As a long-time champion of the lush Violin Concerto by the great stage and screen composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Nicola Benedetti has chosen to build a programme around his late Romantic concerto masterpiece.

This unique collection of violin classics, written specifically for the movies, includes the poignant lament from Schindler’s List.

Dmitri Shostakovich, recognised as the Soviet Union’s greatest film composer, is represented by the beloved Gadfly Romance, as well as the similarly lyrical Andante from the film The Counterplan

The contemporary British cinema is represented by the haunting main theme and specially-composed Fantasy for Violin & Orchestra from the 2004 hit Ladies in Lavender

Siblings Gil and Orli Shahams’ new release 'Nigunim' is a wonderful and thought provoking offering of Hebrew melodies. Jewish folk music has always played an integral part in the Shaham’s life - as a small child, Gil fondly remembers hearing Achron’s Hebrew Melody being sung by his grandparents in Jerusalem. This music, more often than not, vividly evokes troubled origins, the music providing an escape of sorts and the violin the perfect voice which transcends the world from which they sprang. “One very powerful aspect of this music is its soulfulness”, Orli Shaham says; “Regardless of your background, I don’t think you can listen to it without feeling that connection”.

This release includes masterpieces by Ernest Bloch, Joseph Achron and Leo Zeitlin. They all started their musical lives as child prodigy violinists, as their idiomatic writing for the violin might suggest.

The centrepiece of the disc comes from the work sharing the album’s title Nigunim. Commissioned by Gil and Orli from Israeli composer Avner Dorman, it shares the universal appeal of the wordless melodies on which it was named. Unlike Bloch, Achron and Zeitlin, Dorman is a composer/pianist and this can be clearly heard in the equality he gives the piano in this engaging 4 movement violin sonata. “He has created a masterpiece and in my experience everybody who hears the piece falls in love with it – they’re electrified by it”, Gil explains. Indeed, when he performed the work, San Diego Today affirmed that “it was hard to miss [its] visceral excitement and structural elegance”, the Boston Globe admiring the “uncommonly intriguing sounds”.

John Williams is the only composer here who does not share the Shahams’ Jewish heritage, but his mastery in the score Schindler’s List is such that, according to Orli, in this piece “he has absolutely captured the feeling of ghetto life and what that looked like and how people interacted … the pieces included here are so authentic that they are a part of this tradition”.

Orli and Gil’s musical partnership is a lifelong one. The violinist recounts: “Orli and I used to play together at home when we were kids, but we didn’t give concerts together until we were in our 20s”. In addition to countless concert appearances, in the recording studio their collaborations include two previous Canary Classics recordings, The Prokofiev Album (CC02) and Mozart in Paris (CC01) and Dvorák for Two (Deutsche Grammophon).

The violin concertos by Barber and Korngold were composed within six years of each other. The Barber is a particularly challenging work, but there is no evidence of this in Alexander Gilman’s performance with the Cape Town Philharmonic. The programme is completed by the Carmen Fantasy by Franz Waxman from the film Humoresque and the famous main theme from Schindler’s List by John Williams.

In honor of the 80th birthday of one of the world’s most distinctive and beloved musical voices, Sony Classical is proud to announce the release of A Tribute to John Williams – An 80th Birthday Celebration. With instantly recognizable themes from some of the biggest movie blockbusters in recent memory, the album is a celebration of John Williams’ stellar career. The collection contains his personal favorites, chosen from his film and television music as well as concert works and festive occasion pieces. Of special note is the previously unreleased recording of Williams’ joyous “Happy Birthday Variations.” Starting with the theme from Jaws through his latest score for the critically acclaimed War Horse, A Tribute to John Williams – An 80th Birthday Celebration is a collection of brilliant music from one of America’s greatest composers.

John Williams is best known as the dean of film composers and possibly the most beloved American composer of orchestral music in his time. In a career spanning almost six decades, Williams has composed some of the most popular film scores in the history of motion pictures; the Star Wars series, Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler’s List, the first three Harry Potter films and many more. Winner of twenty-one Grammy® Awards, four Golden Globe® Awards and five Academy Awards®, Williams is easily the most successful composer working in film today.

All of the music on this album is both composed and conducted by John Williams, and also features performances by Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, The Boston Pops and the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra!