Daniel Hope / Zürcher Kammerorchester HOPE

 

HOPE

Zürcher Kammerorchester / David Philip Hefti SHADES OF LOVE

 

SHADES OF LOVE

Kay Stern / Dawn Harms / Patricia Helller / Emil Miland VIOLINS OF HOPE

 

VIOLINS OF HOPE

Daniel Hope / Alexey Botvinov SCHNITTKE Works for Violin and Piano

 

WORKS FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO

 

Zürcher Kammerorchester / Daniel Hope SERENADES

 

SERENADES

 

Daniel Hope HOPE@HOME

HOPE@HOME

Daniel Hope BELLE ÉPOQUE

                                                                BELLE ÉPOQUE

Daniel Hope / Zurich Chamber Orchestra JOURNEY TO MOZART

Award-winning British violinist Daniel Hope again joins forces with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra (where he has been Music Director since 2016) for his latest album, Journey to Mozart.

Daniel Hope refers to Mozart as “the boss”, the composer whose genius surpasses all others. “His music is simply incredible,” he observes. “Mozart has a way of conveying emotion that no other composer can match. His music has something which is otherworldly, untouchable, almost unreachable. And yet, he was so very human. If you study his letters in detail, you discover the kind of person he was – a prodigious talent who was misunderstood by his father, by his peers, and who did things his way. He was loved by great composers, hated by others, but never let go of what he wanted: to become an independent composer. Pulled between the pillars and posts of his own time, he somehow managed to write some of the most beautiful music that we have ever heard.”

Journey to Mozart pays tribute to a composer central to Hope’s musical life and takes listeners on a voyage through music history. It opens with the “Dance of the Furies” and “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s ground-breaking opera Orfeo ed Euridice and continues with Haydn’s “Violin Concerto in G major”. Hallmarks of the Classical style can be heard in the nobility and refinement of Haydn’s work and in the expressive eloquence of the Larghetto from Josef Mysliveček’s “Violin Concerto in D major”. Hope ventures into the territory of Mozart’s “Violin Concerto No.3 in G major K.216” and “Adagio in E major K.261”, both written in Salzburg in the mid-1770s, before exploring the Romance for violin and strings by Johann Peter Salomon. A sparkling new arrangement of Mozart’s “Turkish” Rondo, complete with increasingly wild Turkish and Hungarian percussion interventions, signals journey’s end.

“I relish researching different styles of music,” Daniel Hope reflects. “Mozart’s music is modern: so revolutionary that I find it hard to refer to it solely as ‘Classical’. We often use the word today to mean old-fashioned, and yet Mozart is anything but old-fashioned. The Classical period of music history is fascinating because it was at this time that composers, artists and thinkers began to free themselves – to break away from the hierarchical structures that were in place and from serving kings and the aristocracy. We see how the Classical style, governed by the rules of music and, to a certain extent, of etiquette, became a way of life. It was out of this order that the idea of the virtuoso artist was born; in a sense, it was really the beginning of the way we think about music today.”

Daniel Hope SPHERES Einaudi - Glass - Nyman - Pärt - Richter

For as long as mankind has gazed up into the night sky at the stars and planets following their ordained course, the imagination has been set free. In ancient days, people spoke of “music of the spheres”, ghostly sounds that were long thought to have been created by the planetary bodies brushing past each other. The music they made was ethereal and, quite literally, otherworldly.

“I’ve been fascinated for a long time by this idea of ‘spherical music’ and by the philosophers, mathematicians and musicians who expounded their theory of musica universalis over the centuries,” explains Daniel Hope. “It started with Pythagoras and extended to some of those extraordinary German thinkers such as Johannes Kepler who were convinced that music was created when planets move or collide, and that music had a mathematical foundation, a kind of astronomical harmony. I thought it was significant that these were brilliant scientists and mathematicians, not just soothsayers. My aim was to make an album touching on this sublime theme, while also discovering what composers nowadays might write when thinking in this context.”

“Spheres” can be interpreted in a number of ways, beginning with the exploration of pieces that ally themselves to the concept of extraterrestial music which can as easily come from the 17th century as from the 21st. But the circularity of a sphere, the shape’s roundness, can also be related to the use of repetition in much of modern music – from the minimalism of Philip Glass via the fusing of the minimal with a more overtly emotional language, as in Michael Nyman’s Trysting Fields (music from the soundtrack to Peter Greenaway’s film Drowning by Numbers), to the quirky and immediately communicative Eliza Aria by Elena Kats-Chernin. (James Jolly)

Daniel Hope FOR SEASONS

Twenty years ago I came up with a concept that I called “For Seasons”. Since then it has evolved. Mankind has been fascinated by the seasons for an eternity. Hippocrates advised, “Look to the seasons when choosing your cures”; Albert Camus reflected: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

The quarterly divisions of the year are characterized by weather, the hours of daylight, the changes in nature and the cumulative effect of these on mankind, flora and fauna. This album takes Viv-aldi’s masterpiece one step further – by placing it in the context of a 21st-century climatic response: the 12 months are each represented by a specific piece of music. And in turn, 12 visual artists respond to the music and to the seasons.
Let us hope we may all live in a world in which seasons not only exist, but in which their beauty is globally protected. And that they continue to enchant and inspire us. (Daniel Hope)

Daniel Hope MY TRIBUTE TO YEHUDI MENUHIN

Yehudi Menuhin is the reason I became a violinist. As he used to say, I fell into his lap as a baby of two.

For my parents, life in 1970s South Africa had become intolerable, marked as it was by that tragedy mingled with farce, so characteristic of the appalling apartheid regime. We lived in Durban, where my father co-founded the literary magazine Bolt, publishing poems by writers of many races. From that moment on, his phone was tapped and my parents were placed under permanent surveillance. They had no option but to leave the country, but my father was only offered a so-called exit permit. This meant you could leave but never return.

My parents settled in London, where very soon their money ran out. We had nowhere to go.

At the eleventh hour, facing a calamity, we had some incredible luck: an employment agency offered my mother a compelling choice of jobs: secretary to either the Archbishop of Canterbury or to the violinist, Yehudi Menuhin. She chose Menuhin, and their association lasted 24 years until his death.

Our life changed immediately and forever. For the next years, I grew up in Menuhin’s house in Highgate, London, where my mother would take me every day to play, while she worked. Menuhin was a wonderfully spontaneous man. He’d leave his Guarneri del Gesù in an open violin case on the table, he never put it away. He picked it up and played it, almost as if he were drinking a glass of water. He once told me: “One has to play every day. One is like a bird, and can you imagine a bird saying ‘I’m tired today, I don’t feel like flying’?” The violin was a part of him. To this day, his sound remains in my ear, so unique and so fascinatingly beautiful.

Where does one even begin to summarize a unique career spanning seventy-five years by one of the greatest musicians in history? Perhaps Menuhin’s debut in 1924 in San Francisco at the age of seven; or his debut in Berlin in 1929, after which Albert Einstein exclaimed “Now I know there is a God in heaven!” Or his performance and legendary recording of the Elgar concerto under the composer’s baton in 1932; perhaps his visit to the liberated concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen with the composer Benjamin Britten in 1945; or his highly controversial decision to return to Germany in 1947 and to perform with Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic, the first Jewish artist after the war to do so. Only seven of Menuhin’s 82 years were not spent on the road.

Early on in my life, I had the chance to study and perform some of Bartok’s Duos with Menuhin. It was an incredible experience for me, and an introduction to Bartok’s extraordinary music. Many years later, with Menuhin in his role as conductor, we performed over 60 concerts around the world, including almost all of the standard violin concerti, as well as several contemporary works.

These included Mendelssohn’s early D minor Concerto, which he famously discovered in 1951, and also many works for two violins, such as the A minor Double Concerto by Vivaldi.

On 7th March 1999, I played Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto in Düsseldorf, conducted by Lord Menuhin. It was to be Yehudi’s final concert. After the Schnittke, Menuhin encouraged me to play an encore. I spontaneously chose Kaddish, Ravel’s musical version of the Jewish prayer for the dead. I had grown up on Menuhin’s interpretation of this work and wanted to dedicate it to him. Menuhin pushed me out onto the stage and sat amongst the orchestra listening to it. Perhaps it may have been in some way prophetic. Five days later, he passed away.

There’s hardly a passage in all of these great works where I don’t stop for a minute and think of Menuhin.

Yehudi called himself my “musical grandfather”. Now, in celebration of what would have been his centenary, my friends and I can finally pay our respects to this great man, in a manner I feel certain he would have loved. (Daniel Hope)

Thomas Hampson / Wolfram Rieger RICHARD STRAUSS Notturno

This year marks what would be the 150th birthday of the iconic composer, Richard Strauss, and to pay tribute, Deutsche Grammophon releases Notturno, songs by Richard Strauss performed by American baritone Thomas Hampson. Widely recognized as one of the premiere interpreters of German art song today, Hampson celebrates Strauss’ 150th anniversary with several concerts in Europe and North America, along with a new production of the composer’s Arabella which took place in April at the Salzburg Easter Festival.

Adding to an already considerable discography and videography for Deutsche Grammophon, the newly released Notturno highlights Hampson’s incredible talents with an expertly-crafted collection of Lieder by Richard Strauss which also includes guest artist Daniel Hope. Hampson stated, “Richard Strauss’ songs provide each of us havens of contemplations as we travel our own paths and discover our own ‘stories’”.

Recomposed By MAX RICHTER Vivaldi - The Four Seasons

It starts with a shimmer of something strange and soft, an ambient mist of strings that's both electronic and acoustic. Then something weird happens. Out of these shifting sonic tides comes an ensemble of violins – playing fragments of the world's most overfamiliar concerto, the soundtrack to 1,000 adverts, an on-hold phone favourite that features on every classical compilation ever. Yes, it's Vivaldi's Four Seasons – but not as we know it. This is Vivaldi Recomposed, by genre-hopping, new-music maestro Max Richter. So the big, clanging question is: why? Why retouch, rework, and reimagine Vivaldi's evergreen pictorial masterpiece? "The Four Seasons is something we all carry around with us," says Richter, a German-born British composer. "It's just everywhere. In a way, we stop being able to hear it. So this project is about reclaiming this music for me personally, by getting inside it and rediscovering it for myself – and taking a new path through a well-known landscape." This involved "throwing molecules of the original Vivaldi into a test tube with a bunch of other things, and waiting for an explosion". You can hear this chemical reaction particularly well at the opening of Richter's reworked Summer concerto, which has become a weird collision of Arvo Pärt-likemelancholy in the solo violin and a minimalist workout for the rest of the strings. "There are times I depart completely from the original, yes, but there are moments when it pokes through. I was pleased to discover that Vivaldi's music is very modular. It's pattern music, in a way, so there's a connection with the whole post-minimalist aesthetic I'm part of." Part of the fun of the album is that your ears play tricks with your memory of the original: these familiar melodies do unexpected things, resulting in an experience that's both disturbing yet full of strange delights. And imagine how it felt for Recomposed's solo violinist Daniel Hope: having played the original for decades, he – and more importantly his fingers – faced a surreal task when he first picked his way through Richter's score. "It was incredibly thought-provoking," he says. "I had to deal with all the curveballs Max throws at you, the way he does things you don't expect." The experience clearly messed with Hope's mind. "What really threw me was the first movement of Autumn. He pulls the rhythm around, starts dropping quavers here and there. You end up with a rickety and slightly one-legged Vivaldi. It's incredibly funny. But even in poking fun at the original, there's always enormous respect." The slow movement of Winter is another standout moment for Hope. "It's really out of this world," he says. "It's as if an alien has picked it up and pulled it through a time warp. It's really eerie: Max has kept Vivaldi's melody, but it's pulled apart by the ethereal harmonics underneath it." Can it all work beyond the recording studio? Audiences at the Barbican in London will find out later this month, when Vivaldi Recomposed is given its debut performance, with Hope backed by the Britten Sinfonia under the baton of André de Ridder. If the work sends listeners back to the original with new ears, that's all part of the point, says Richter. "The original Four Seasons is a phenomenally innovative and creative piece of work. It's so dynamic, so full of amazing images. And it feels very contemporary. It's almost a kind of jump-cut aesthetic – all those extreme leaps between different kinds of material. Hats off to him. That's what I'm really pleased with: my aim was to fall in love with the original again – and I have." (Tom Service The Guardian, Sunday 21 October 2012)

Daniel Hope AIR a baroque journey

From its creation in the mid-16th century by Andrea Amati to the present day, the modern violin has had an extraordinary and tempestuous history. Arguably its greatest development came during the Baroque era, as violinists and composers, in a sense liberated from the austerity and contrapuntal strictures of The Renaissance, went on a journey, both musically and geographically, avidly seeking more extravagant and original ways in which to express themselves on this fascinating new instrument.
Air sets out to trace one such Baroque journey. It is the story of four unique composers, three of whom were virtuoso violinists, one a lutenist – Falconiero, Matteis and Geminiani from Italy, and Westhoff from Germany. They wandered throughout Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries in search of musical inspiration and crosspollination, and their music and art of performance intrigued and delighted kings, contemporaries and audiences alike.
As well as works by these four composers, this album also features some of the other music of their time, in an attempt to show the cultural exchange taking place, much of it intuitively, between musical minds across borders.
Some of these composers were influenced directly by what they heard, whether it was Geminiani by Handel, Bach by Westhoff or Matteis by the wealth of folk music he encountered on his travels to the British Isles.
This album sets out to show just how diverse the music of the Baroque era was. Air blends the simplest and at times most primitive forms of dance music with the most sophisticated and revolutionary compositions of the day, culminating in a work by Bach - the great master, whose title is my inspiration for this collection, and whose music remains for me today more modern than that of anyone else. (Daniel Hope)