I heard his Nachtmusiken at the Mahler in Manchester festival in 2010 and thought it would be the perfect work with which to launch my tenure at the Colorado MahlerFest. One of the highlights of my 2015-6 season (and there were actually quite a few) was getting my first chance to conduct the music of Kurt Schwertsik. It was one of the pieces that those of us who admired and loved John were scrambling to record before he died. One such work is his Second Violin Concerto, a large-scale, bold, magnificent work which combines a sort of Bartókian intensity and strength of character with a potent lyrical impulse. While by no means an unknown composer, the sheer magnitude of his accomplishment remains somewhat under recognized simply because so many of his major pieces await commercial recordings and regular performances. John McCabe’s death in 2015 was a devastating blow to British musical life. More on Joachim’s dubious track record on behalf of his friends’ music.The slow movement may well be the most haunting few minutes of music written in the 19 th C- I can scarcely think of anything so sad and fragile. Instead, it is austere, strange and often incredibly beautiful music. The Violin Concerto has none of the quicksilver wit or boundless fluency of rhetoric that so animates Schumann’s early piano music. The story of how the work came to light is one of the strangest and funniest in music history. Joachim expressed great early enthusiasm for the piece, but made a fool of himself during a run through of it with orchestra and then suppressed the work, stipulating it could only be published 100 years after his death. Schumann wrote his final orchestral work for his very close friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. The numbering/ordering of the 11 works on this list is completely arbitrary. Which works do you think are the unknown gems of the violin repertoire? Share your thoughts in the comments. This list, while “official” and “all time” is by no means exclusive or complete. Vote with your pocketbook for a recording industry that continues to make great music widely available. If you can buy the CD, you should- downloading a stream does nothing to support future recordings of unknown music. Here then are 10 pieces you should listen to today. Of course, there’s no point in directing you towards completely obscure works- if you can’t listen to them, there’s really no point. Today we’re looking farther out, towards the uncharted frontier of the repertoire. All major works, none heard as often as I’d like live, but all well known among musicians and readily available on disc. More recently, there are modern classics by Lutoslawski, John Adams, John Corigliano and Alfred Schnittke. Then there are those works which are still relatively rarely sighted in the concert hall, but have been recorded and discussed quite broadly- Korngold’s, Shostakovich’s Second (even greater than the First), the Khachaturian (not a fan!). C concerti that are now pretty well established in the repertoire, such as those by Shostakovich (particularly his First), Barber, Berg, Bartók (particularly his Second) and Prokofiev. Ever wonder what sort of concertos exist for the violin beyond the marvelous mainstays from Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Brahms and Sibelius? Well- there’s a lot out there.
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