Album of the week: The masterpiece I’d never heard
mainIt has been an age since I looked to my shelves for a work by a major composer and found that, after 40 years of building a library, I don’t have it. Nor, so far as I recall, have I ever heard it, either in concert or on the radio (though a few recordings do exist)….
Happily the gap has now been filled. Find out what it is here.
I have been listening to classical music for a similar time, and recently discovered for the first time the violin concerto by Max Reger. How on earth is this NOT in the standard repertoire?
Reger’s late-romantic heavily contrapuntal idiom is not to all tastes (I say that if you dislike Brahms you will hate Reger). He is certainly not programmed regularly in the UK – I recall his ‘Variations and fugue on a merry theme of Johann Adam Hiller’ appearing on posters for an Albert Hall concert as ‘Variations on a theme of Hitler’!
I don’t get it…. The Zukerman/Pearlman recording is a real classic and even the one on ECM by Keller and Pilz has been widely reviewed! Why is this such a surprise for someone who considers himself a collector of classical recordings? I’ve heard some of the duos done as encores with violin soloits and concert masters… Why the surprise?
Why the “faint” surprise would be correct here… Promotion trick. Any violin student knows about those wonderful pieces they can play with their teacher…
Well, he did indicate this was a rare circumstance.
I suppose the 44 Bartok duos are a “niche product”. They are known to most violinists who have made it to the intermediate level of violin playing. I have played some of the duos with my violin teacher and I suspect that many other violinists have done so with their teachers. I agree that the Perlman/Zukerman recording is wonderful. In any event, it is nice that Norman has brought these duos to the attention of more people by reviewing this newest recording.
THe great violinists Viktoria Mullova and Thomas Zehetmair did a selection of the Duos at the 2005 Proms. It was quite a high profile concert
The online BBC listings (since 1923) shows that the Duos have been broadcast (either whole or in selection) many times.
I particularly remember the broadcast by Sandor Vegh & Alberto Lysy
http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk
These are pretty mainstream pieces.
Also for 2 violins: Luciano Berio’s Duetti, which are fantastic — some of them sounding (almost) like a string quartet at times.
Andre Gertler-Josef Suk,.wonderful!
Surprised that he didn’t know this work. Every violinist has gone through these duos a hundred times, although I admit they’re not performed all too often as a set. I usually perform 8-10 of them at a time.