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Eugène Ysaÿe: 6 Sonatas for Violin Solo, Op. 27 (Deutsche Grammophon)
★★★★☆
Each period has its defining violinist. For the second half of the nineteenth century it was the avuncular Joseph Joachim, for the primary third of the twentieth the mischievous Fritz Kreisler. Then got here Heifetz, Menuhin, Perlman, briefly Vengerov and full cease. If there’s a defining violinist within the current century I think it’s Hilary Hahn.
American to her pop-socks, solid from age ten within the Curtis foundry, she has hardly put a profession foot mistaken, limiting her live performance engagements and taking day out to have two daughters. At 43, she stands head and a shoulder pad taller than the closest contender — and there are only a few who come wherever nearer than a green-room minder. She flits between mild classics — the Korngold concerto — and the lethal critical.
Her newest venture consists of the six solo sonatas by the Belgian virtuoso Ysaÿe, a set of workout routines as testing technically as they’re intellectually. A solo piece for violin is a glass of plain water. Solely the really achieved can fill it with color and style. Ysaÿe left some clues by investing the sonatas with characters of six contemporaries, together with Kreisler and the Frenchman Thibaud. However who other than fiddle-geeks would recognise their fashion these days, and why does it matter?
Hahn takes the set as a film storyboard. The primary is a dialog between Bach and Stravinsky, the second a meditation on the Dies Irae, the third a Balkan travelogue, and so forth. The enjoying isn’t lower than commanding and the narrative simply grips. That is what it means to be an epochal violinist: the flexibility to make all music sound immortal.
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Norman Lebrecht is among the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s an everyday presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Road Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
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