Gunar Letzbor - Partitas for Solo Violin - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Rare-instrument specialist Thomas Bloch is equally at home performing on the soundtrack to Milos Forman' Amadeus, with rock group Radiohead, or at La Scala, Milan or the Salzburg Festival.

Gunar Letzbor and his ensemble Ars Antiqua Austria have been working with violin music from the Habsburg Empire for decades, and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's violin sonatas from 1681 were, as Letzbor himself says, Incha milestone in his artistic developmentInch. The first recording was made in 1994 and since then Ars Antiqua Austria has regularly performed this repertoire in concerts. While Biber was still largely unknown at that time, the composer and his work are now considered by audiences to be among the greats of the Baroque era. Biber was highly acclaimed by his contemporaries as a violin virtuoso and as a composer. His portrait shows a noble man with great charisma and a dignified, proud bearing. However, after many years of studying the violin sonatas, Gunar Letzbor has now gained a completely different impression of Biber's personality, namely that of a daredevil and avant-garde composer. His violin sonatas are full of wild ideas, formal boundaries are dissolved, the technical demands go beyond all the limits of violin playing of his time. And most importantly, the emotions reach the limits of the emotional range. Gunar Letzbor puts all this experience into his new recording of Biber's violin sonatas from 1681 and, as with his recording of Biber's rosary sonatas (see PC 10409), once again presents a reference recording.

Alongside his success directing the ensemble Ars Antiqua Austria, Gunar Letzbor has not let up on demonstrating his talents as a violinist. After the recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonatas and Partitas the 12 Fantasias by Georg Philipp Telemann present him again completely Incha soloInch. Telemann's Fantasias for Solo Violin are reflections both of his full maturity as a composer and of being highly proficient violinist himself, with the exceptionally prolific and enormously busy composer publishing sets of fantasias for solo instruments - flute, viola da gamba as well as violin - without basso continuo in Hamburg in the 1730s. The 12 Fantasias recorded here are written for an unaccompanied instrument and manage to embrace both the long established style for polyphony in German violin music - with fugues and multi-part writing for the violin - and more modern trends - galanterien and Italian sonata and concerto influences. Gunar Letzbor plays a Sebastian Klotz violin from the eighteenth century.