Stephen Waarts - Schumann & Bartok: Violin Sonatas No.1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Adam Golka's third album for FHR begins a wonderful journey in which he records all of Beethoven's 32 Piano Sonatas. This first volume, released in Beethoven's 250th anniversary year, includes one of the composer's most celebrated works, the 'Pathétique' Sonata in C minor, alongside the contrasting Sonatas, Op. 10. All four sonatas were written 1796-98. Since first self-presenting and performing Beethoven's 32 Piano Sonatas at the age of 18, Adam Golka has immersed himself in studying the master's works. He has studied Beethoven under the guidance of masters such as Leon Fleisher, Alfred Brendel, Sir András Schiff, Murray Perahia, and Ferenc Rados. In 2011, Adam performed a cycle of all five Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Lubbock Symphony, with his brother Tomasz at the baton, and last summer, he made his San Francisco Symphony début at the Stern Grove Festival in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. He will celebrate Beethoven's 250th birthday in 2020 by playing the whole cycle of Beethoven's 32 Piano Sonatas in multiple cities, which includes a self-produced video series named 32@32, made in collaboration with filmmaker Zac Nicholson and designed to be part of the concert experience.

The Orpheum Foundation, which has been supporting young musicians for over thirty years, has joined forces with Alpha Classics for a series of recordings devoted to Mozart's concertos, regardless of instrument. The leading soloists of the young generation have been selected to appear under the artistic direction of Howard Griffiths, a renowned Mozart conductor, who considers that performing his music is like 'looking in a mirror you can hear if everything is in place, musicality, intonation, rhythm, phrasing'. These albums will reveal the great virtuosos of tomorrow and immortalize their success in this implacable test. The artists featured on this include Stephen Waarts, Can Cakmur, and Ivo Dudler.

For some time, writes viola virtuoso Mathis Rochat in the preface of this new , he had been thinking to adapt Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Cello Concerto in B-flat Major for his own use. He calls it a Inchsomewhat audacious transcriptionInch, but the range of the solo part is well-suited for the viola and can be performed on the instrument with great ease. Which had to be proven first! Indeed, the young Swiss artist lends the Inchhigher-pitchedInch composition a power of momentum and elasticity from which the already supple, melodious music can only benefit. All the more, since it is a superb InchovertureInch to both of the following works, which Johann Gottlieb Graun, eleven years Bach's senior, had intended for the viola. Sometimes flanked by it's little sister, as in the quiet Sturm und Drang C Minor concerto, then alone in sole competition with the string orchestra, this under-appreciated instrument shows in the music of the Berlin Court a wealth of expression that need not hide behind it's higher and lower rivals.