Isabelle Faust, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks & Jakub Hruša – Britten: Violin Concerto, Chamber Works (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:55 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
After Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky, Isabelle Faust now tackles Britten with Jakub Hrůša and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, revealing a little-known facet of the British composer. This concerto, highly personal in its language, combines drama with humour, seriousness with satire, in music of overwhelming emotional depth. The programme is completed by early chamber works.
Read moremusica assoluta, Paavo Järvi, Isabelle Faust, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Christian Tetzlaff, Sharon Kam – Thorsten Encke: A Portrait (Live) (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:10:28 minutes | 618 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © CAvi-music
A Portrait oft he composer Thorsten Encke „When you embark on an artistic project, structural considerations can serve as a spark of inspiration. Like an architect, you roll out a blueprint, jot down a series of notes, and establish a basic framework of interval relations. Then you thoughtfully furnish the interior by relating motifs to one another and assigning them dramatic roles within the musical narrative. All of this is certainly necessary. But then, new ideas take you on detours, unplanned inspiration imposes itself on your thoughts, and the structural spark of inspiration dwindles with each new effort. The work acquires a life of its own; it wants to grow beyond its former limits. As an artist, you have to surrender and try to sense where the journey leads you.
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Isabelle Faust, Anne-Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov – Schumann: Piano Quartet – Piano Quintet (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 54:40 minutes | 1,92 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
In his Piano Quartet and Quintet, Schumann revisited the frameworks inherited from Schubert and Beethoven to create astonishingly innovative structures. Their grandiose musical and emotional gestures place these works among his supreme achievements. The prestigious artists assembled here, with their extensive experience of performing Schumann’s chamber music and concertos, do full justice to his imaginative world.
Read moreIsabelle Faust – Solo: Matteis – Pisendel – Biber – Guillemain – Vilsmayr (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:27 minutes | 1,00 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
From Biber’s famous ‘Guardian Angel’ Passacaglia to Guillemain’s ‘Amusements’ and sonatas and fantasias by Matteis (father and son), Pisendel and Vilsmayr, Isabelle Faust offers us a panorama of European music for unaccompanied violin from the second half of the Baroque era. Dreamy or virtuosic, these pieces bear witness to the diversity of inspirations from Italy, France, England and the German-speaking countries – and to their marvellous intermingling echoes.
Read moreIsabelle Faust, Il giardino armonico & Giovanni Antonini – Locatelli: il virtuoso, il poeta (Violin Concertos & Concerti Grossi) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/176,4 kHz | Time – 01:08:20 minutes | 2,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Locatelli was one of the most impressive violin virtuosos of the first half of the eighteenth century. Considered today as a sort of Baroque Paganini, he left picturesque, colourful, strikingly modern pieces for his instrument. A few years after a Mozart collaboration that earned them worldwide acclaim, Isabelle Faust and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico bring out the full narrative intensity of these concertos, worthy of the operatic stage!
Read moreIsabelle Faust – Ondřej Adámek: Follow Me & Where Are You? (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:01:01 minutes | 607 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BR-Klassik
Born in Prague in 1979, the composer, conductor and chorus master Ondrej Adámek, who studied in his Czech hometown and in Paris, has already won numerous prestigious awards for his orchestral, chamber, vocal and electro-acoustic music. In his musical language, which also repeatedly incorporates elements of distant cultures, he creates unusual musical narratives. He seeks the authenticity of his interpretations by combining voices and movements, gestures and theatricality, phonetic and semantic aspects, and his own specially developed musical instruments.
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Isabelle Faust – Bach: Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, vol.2, BWV 1001-1003 (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:20 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Following up on the 2010 release of Volume I of J.S. Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin, which covered BWV 1004-1006, Isabelle Faust presents BWV 1001-1003 on the second volume, her 2012 release on Harmonia Mundi. For the first installment, she garnered critical acclaim and popular praise for her unstinting scholarship and unparalleled virtuosity, and the same applies to the long-awaited completion of the project. As in her previous performances, Faust uses the manuscript as her source and is careful to get all details right, while finding the proper balance between Bach’s expression and her own. Faust plays a Stradivarius violin from 1704, nicknamed “Sleeping Beauty,” and her tone is pure and radiant, despite some unavoidable but minimal scratchiness on double-stops, and she has a slight vibrato that she uses sparingly, almost as embellishment, in keeping with Baroque practice. The sonatas and partitas are virtuoso works where everything is exposed and a violinist’s abilities are put to the ultimate test, not only in managing technical difficulties, but also in imagining the sounds, ornaments, textures, timbres, and nuances that Bach implies in his writng. Faust is one of the few artists to withstand the toughest scrutiny, and her set is highly recommended for her extraordinary fidelity to the music and true artistry.
Review by Blair Sanderson
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Isabelle Faust – Bach : Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, vol. 1 (BWV 1004, 1005, 1006) (2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:55 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
“Clapton is God!” was the well-known graffiti scrawled across 20th century London, praising the Englishman’s fiery guitar playing. Based on Isabelle Faust’s blazing accounts of Bach’s sonatas and partitas on this 2010 Harmonia Mundi disc, one might expect to see the graffiti “Faust is God!” scrawled across 21st century Paris. Rather than play all six of these canonical works of the solo violin literature, Faust has chosen the D minor and E major partitas and placed the C major Sonata between them. All three are tremendously difficult both technically and expressively, but starting with the D minor Partita with its celebrated Chaconne was particularly audacious. Faust rises to the challenge with an utterly devastating account of the work. Playing with only a dab of vibrato but a boatload of virtuosity, she overcomes every technical hurdle in this surpassingly difficult work. She saves the best for last, and her Chaconne is stunningly powerful, as well as amazingly nuanced and profoundly moving. Her other two performances are equally impressive, especially the opening Adagio and Fugue from the C major Sonata, which builds from a whisper to a shattering contrapuntal climax. There have been other great recordings of these works, but Faust’s surely belongs among the best. Harmonia Mundi’s sound is close but not overly intimate.
Review by James Leonard
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Isabelle Faust, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Harding – Bartók: Violin Concertos No. 1 & 2 (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:57 minutes | 902 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Isabelle Faust’s first recording for harmonia mundi, Bartok Sonatas, won her a Gramophone Young Artist of the Year. Here she returns to Bartok, perfoming the two concertos, accompanied by Daniel Harding and the Swedish Radio SO.
Such is the fame of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto (1937-38), that it has virtually eclipsed the First, written 30 years before. Yet, this earlier work, rediscovered long after the composer’s death, has a fascinating story all of its own. True to form, Isabelle Faust has gone back to the multiple musical sources of this First Concerto, a work that came ‘straight from the heart’, as Bartók’s romance with a young violinist lay at the core of its creative process.
‘I owe my enthusiasm for the music of Béla Bartók to the wonderful Hungarian violinist Dénes Zsigmondy, who was privileged to know the composer personally. At the age of eleven, I was lucky enough to study the Sonata for solo violin with him and thus to discover Bartók’s world in a very emotional and instinctive way. In the years since then, Dénes Zsigmondy, his conception of music, and especially his interpretation of Bartók have formed an important component of my artistic career. It seemed only logical to choose the Bartók sonatas for my debut CD. I am now delighted to present the two violin concertos in this recording. It is intended as a musical expression of my admiration for the composer Béla Bartók and my gratitude for the continued inspiration and faithful friendship of Dénes Zsigmondy. My warm thanks go to László Somfai and László Vikárius of the Bartók Archives in Budapest and to Felix Meyer of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel for their generous support of this project. Finally, I would like to express my profound appreciation of and indebtedness to Daniel Harding and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra for their absolutely fantastic contribution to the recording sessions.’ (Isabelle Faust)
Read moreIsabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano & Violin, Vol. 2 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:22 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Using period instruments, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov breathe new life into these ‘sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment’, a tradition Mozart renewed from within, blazing the trail for Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. The first volume was widely praised:
Read moreIsabelle Faust, Kristian Bezuidenhout – J.S. Bach: Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:27:35 minutes | 1,80 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
The six Sonatas for Violin and Obbligato Harpsichord BWV 1014-1019 (“obbligato” – compulsory – means the keyboard is fully scored, as opposed to basso continuo for which only the bass is scored, the rest being left to the discretion of the performer, who improvises) are some of these works that Bach kept revisiting and reworking. The oldest remaining source – from around 1725, through one of his nephews – already highlights the will to make these compositions evolve by refining them with successive adjustments. The work underwent another overhaul in Agricola’s manuscript, around 1741, while a copy made around 1750 by Altnickol reveals a third cycle status. An observation made by the musician’s second youngest son, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach – “He wrote these trios just before his end” – seems to have been interpreted as proof that Bach was still working on these sonatas in the last years of his life. This new recording by Isabelle Faust, a great specialist of baroque interpretation, and Christian Bezuidenhout on the harpsichord, discretely reveals the extraordinary richness of these works’ three-voice writing, that resembles the format of a trio sonata.
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