Virtuoso Dances by Linus Roth & José Gallardo

Various composers

Linus Roth & José Gallardo

Virtuoso Dances

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: Evil Penguin
UPC: 0608917722420
Catnr: EPRC 0037
Release date: 05 March 2021
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Label
Evil Penguin

UPC
0608917722420

Catalogue number
EPRC 0037

Release date
05 March 2021

"The very best idea to create a positive atmosphere in this bad time"

Luister, 02-5-2021

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

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About the album

2020... Sitting at home with no performances ahead brought Linus Roth back to his notebooks, in which he had been jotting down random musical ideas over the course of many years. One of them that suddenly struck him, was an idea for a recording programme made up of some of his most beloved pieces for violin and piano, all of which had in common both a virtuoso character and that they were all dances. What better way to lift the spirits than with dance music? Linus called his long term musical partner, pianist José Gallardo and five weeks later, they had the remarkable opportunity to record the album in the visually stunning and acoustically unique Library of the former monastery in Ochsenhausen, Germany, home of the Music Academy of Baden-Württemberg.

Op dit album opbeurende muziek gespeeld door de getalenteerde violist Linus Roth en zijn vertrouwde muzikale partner pianist José Gallardo. Heerlijk om naar te luisteren en prachtig opgenomen.

2020, Linus Roth zat thuis, geen optredens in het vooruitzicht, wat te doen. De violist nam zijn toevlucht tot zijn notitieboekjes, waarin hij jarenlang lukraak muzikale ideeën had genoteerd. Een van die zomaar opgekomen ideeën was het opnemen van enkele van zijn meest geliefde en populaire stukken voor viool en piano. Stukken met alle een virtuoos karakter, die met elkaar gemeen hadden dat het dansen waren. Wat is er mooier dan dansmuziek om ons in sombere tijden in een goede stemming te brengen?

Linus belde zijn, sinds jaar en dag vertrouwde, muzikale partner, José Gallardo, en vijf weken later kregen ze, opmerkelijk genoeg, de kans om hun album op te nemen in de adembenemend mooie en qua akoestiek unieke bibliotheek van het voormalige klooster in Ochsenhausen in Duitsland, waarin de muziekacademie van Baden-Württemberg gevestigd is. Het resultaat is er naar. Een genot om naar te luisteren deze prachtige klanken van virtuoze dansen.

2020... Als Linus Roth zu Hause saß und keine Auftritte vor sich hatte, griff er wieder zu seinen Notizbüchern, in denen er über viele Jahre hinweg wahllos musikalische Ideen notiert hatte. Eine davon, die ihm plötzlich einfiel, war die Idee für ein Aufnahmeprogramm, das aus einigen seiner beliebtesten Stücke für Violine und Klavier bestand, die alle sowohl einen virtuosen Charakter als auch die Tatsache gemeinsam hatten, dass es sich um Tänze handelte. Was gibt es Besseres als Tanzmusik, um die Stimmung zu heben? Linus rief seinen langjährigen musikalischen Partner, den Pianisten José Gallardo, an, und fünf Wochen später hatten sie die bemerkenswerte Gelegenheit, das Album in der optisch atemberaubenden und akustisch einzigartigen Bibliothek des ehemaligen Klosters in Ochsenhausen, Deutschland, dem Sitz der Musikakademie Baden-Württemberg, aufzunehmen.

Artist(s)

Linus Roth (violin)

Linus Roth, who received the ECHO KLASSIK Award as 'Best Newcomer' 2006 for his début CD on the label EMI, was awarded his second ECHO award in 2017 for his recording of the violin concertos by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky with the London Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Sanderling.
Linus Roth has made a name for himself internationally, not just with his acclaimed work in core repertoire, but also with his discovery / rediscovery of works that have undeservedly fallen into oblivion. He has devoted special attention to the works of Mieczysław Weinberg, both on the concert platform and the recording studio. Roth's recording of the complete works for violin and piano by Mieczysław Weinberg, released in 2013 by Challenge Classics to wide public and critical acclaim was followed up by recordings of Weinberg’s Violin Concerto with the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester and his Concertino with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn. Both CDs were selected as 'Editor’s Choice' by Gramophone magazine. Making Mieczysław Weinberg’s oeuvre known to a wider audience is also the aim of the International Weinberg Society, which Linus Roth founded in 2015. This association organises and sponsors concerts, readings, exhibitions, interdisciplinary events and publications on the work and life of the Polish-Jewish composer. For the 100th anniversary of Weinberg’s birth in 2019, Linus Roth will curate two days of events dedicated to the composer in the form of six concerts at Wigmore Hall in London. In addition to chamber music works, all of Weinberg’s six sonatas for violin and piano as well as the three sonatas for solo violin will be played, including by Linus Roth himself.
Linus Roth has played as a soloist with many leading orchestras including the Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn, the German Radio Symphony Orchestras of broadcasters SWR and Berlin, the Orquesta de Cordoba, the Orchestra della Toscana in Florence, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Chamber Philharmonic, the Bern Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra del Teatro San Carlo in Naples, the Cologne Chamber Orchestra and the Bruckner Orchester Linz. Conductors with whom Roth has worked include Gerd Albrecht, Frank Beermann, Herbert Blomstedt, Andrey Boreyko, Finnegan Downie Dear, Dennis Russell Davies, Kevin John Edusei, Dan Ettinger, James Gaffigan, Hartmut Haenchen, Domonkos Héja, Antony Hermus, Manfred Honeck, Kirill Karabits, Isaac Karabtchevsky, Mihkel Kütson, Leo McFall, Thomas Sanderling, Konstantin Trinks, and Antoni Wit.
A passionate chamber musician, he has performed fellow musicians such as Nicolas Altstaedt, Gautier Capuçon, Kim Kashkashian, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Albrecht Mayer, Nils Mönkemeyer, Andreas Ottensamer, Benjamin Schmid, Christian Poltéra, Julian Steckel, Markus Schirmer, Julien Quentin, Jens-Peter Maintz, Florian Uhlig, Itamar Golan and Danjulo Ishizaka, among others. He has also worked closely for several years with the Argentinean pianist José Gallardo.
Linus Roth attended the preparatory class of Prof. Nicolas Chumachenco at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, Germany, before going on to study with Prof. Zakhar Bron. Subsequently, he pursued his studies for several years with Prof. Ana Chumachenco at the Universities of Music in Zurich and Munich. Salvatore Accardo, Miriam Fried and Josef Rissin have also been important influences on him. During his studies, Linus Roth held a scholarship from the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation.
In October 2012, Linus Roth was appointed Professor of Violin at the 'Leopold-Mozart-Zentrum' at Augsburg University and is also the artistic director of the Leopold Mozart International Violin Competition in Augsburg. In addition, Linus Roth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the International Festival Ibiza Concerts and from 2020 on of the music festival Schwäbischer Frühling in Ochsenhausen /Germany Linus Roth plays the Stradivarius violin 'Dancla' from 1703 on kind loan from the music foundation of the L-Bank Baden-Württemberg.
In his free time, Roth enjoys fitness sports of all kinds, travelling, eating out and loves boating around the Mediterranean. He has lived in Munich for many years.

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José Gallardo (piano)

A native of Buenos Aires, Argentina, José Gallardo started piano lessons at the age of five, at first at the Conservatory in Buenos Aires. Later he continued his studies with Prof. Poldi Mildner in the Faculty of Music at the University of Mainz, completing his diploma in 1997. Even then he realised his first love would be for chamber music.
His musical inspiration came from such artists as Menahem Pressler, Alfonso Montecino, Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Sergiu Celibidache, Rosalyn Tureck and Bernard Greenhouse.
José Gallardo has won many national and international awards. Invitations followed for numerous tours and festivals, including the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival, the Asiago Festival in Italy, the Ludwigsburg Palace Festival, the Schwetzingen Festival, the Kronberg Cello Festival, and the Rheingau Music Festival.
He is very busy playing recitals and concerts, including chamber music appearances with other musicians in Europe, Asia, Israel, Oceania and South America, among them Alberto Lysy, Gidon Kremer, Chen Zimbalista, Julius Berger, Danjulo Ishizaka, Nicolas Altstaedt and many more. Concert halls he has played in include the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Hamburg Musikhalle, the Kurhaus Wiesbaden, Teatro della Pergola Florence and the Wigmore Hall London. From 1998 to 2008, he taught in the faculty of music at the University of Mainz; since autumn 2008, he has been teaching at the Leopold Mozart Zentrum in the University of Augsburg.

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Composer(s)

Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer is such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.
Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Within his meticulous structures is embedded, however, a highly romantic nature.

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Béla Bartók

Next to Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók was a third seminal innovator of European art music at the start of the twentieth century. Bartók, too, sought a way out of the deadlock of tonal music around 1900, and he found it in folk music. Initially, he tied in with the nationalistic tradition of Franz Liszt with his tone poem Kossuth, but eventually he found his own voice with the rediscovery of the music of Hungarian peasants. Together with Zoltán Kodály he was one of the first to apply the results of folkloric research into his own compositions. One major difference between him and composers of the 19th century, was that Bartók did not adjust to the system of tonality, but created his own musical idiom from folk music. Because of this, his composition style was flexible to other musical trends, without having to violate his own view points. For example, his two Violin sonates come close to Schoenberg's free expressionism, and after 1926 his music started to show neoclassicistic tendencies, comparable to Stravinsky's music. Bartók was not just interested in Hungarian folk music, but could appreciate musical folklore from all of the Balkan, Turkey and North-Africa as well.

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Karol Szymanovski

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last of these transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase" which continued with works such as Renard, The Soldier's Tale and Les Noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony), drawing on earlier styles, especially from the 18th century. This style was often referred to as Neoclassicism. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, and of instrumentation.

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