Lena Neudauer / Cappella Aquileia / Marcus Bosch BEETHOVEN Violin Concerto - Romances

VIOLIN CONCERTO - ROMANCES

Danjulo Ishizaka / When-Xiao Zheng / Silke Avenhaus / Rick Srotijn / Lena Neudauer SCHUBERT TROUTS

World Premieres for the exciting TROUT PROJECT: Silke Avenhaus had wanted to record Schubert’s Trout Quintet for a long time. Now five European composers were additionally asked to quasi-casually prolong Schubert’s ambivalences into the present by supplying their own variations. The commission called for works that were to be limited in length, and each composer was asked to focus his attention on a particular instrument. Although all of their pieces are based on the Trout theme, the resulting works vary utterly in terms of character and tempo. As Avenhaus puts it, this is a “godsend”. The new compositions can be grasped as individual movements of a contemporary Trout quintet,but one can also combine them in several different ways. 

Is this a “sunny piece”? Cheerful? Carelessly babbling like a brook? It tends to be exclusively associated with positive images, but pianist Silke Avenhaus, the initiator of the “Trout Project”, contrasts all of this with the work’s fundamental ambivalence. In Schubert’s quintet she finds a mixture of lightness and melancholy. The first movement’s insouciance, for instance, is almost casually obliterated in the second one. Schubert does not hold fast to any mood or attitude for long: ambivalence continues to hold sway, and it is a trait she particularly appreciates.

The double bass and the cello form a strong bass section in this particular piano quintet. The line-up may have been unusual and difficult to score in terms of timbre, but Schubert skillfully made best of the situation by expanding the range of different sonorities to the maximum. The low strings fathom the underground. Conversely, the piano, often playing in octaves for long stretches in the upper range, carries out the assigned role of shining brightly on the mountain peaks. The middle range is tenderly filled out by the other strings. The resulting musical texture seems to float in midair. (from the lines notes by Elgin Heuerding)

Lena Neudauer W.A. MOZART Violinkonzerte 1 - 5, Adagio KV 261, Rondos KV 269 & 373

As the blood began to spill in Lexington and Concord in 1775, triggering the Revolutionary War, Mozart was nineteen years old, composing safely in Salzburg. And though most well known as a piano prodigy, he was also quite the violinist, having toured Europe to perform for royal courts during his childhood. The love of his second instrument is apparent given the diversity of repertoire written for it, ranging from string duets to full symphonic works. That is most explicitly on display in his five violin concertos, all written within the same two years of that era of great revolution and political upheaval.

This intense focus on violin concertos was short-lived, and it is a mystery why Mozart stopped writing them altogether after 1775. But even during this brief period in Mozart’s life, the five concertos he wrote serve as a microcosm for his evolution as a composer.

 In the Violin Concerto No. 1, written in 1773, elements of baroque music are the building blocks, with a fairly strict adherence to the norms of the era, not unlike the nascent and abiding pre-Revolution America. Fast-forward two years, though, and Mozart’s violin concertos of 1775 – beginning with the second – take on a more subversive shape, mirroring the unrest in the American colonies.

Continuing the revolutionary undertones of these pieces, German violinist Lena Neudauer brings more than just notes on a page to these performance. In addition to masterfully crafted interpretations, Neudauer has composed all-new cadenzas, injecting her own voice into music that might otherwise be a simple following of a black-dotted roadmap to conformity. Neudauer’s recording presents all five of Mozart’s violin concertos, in addition to a string adagio and two rondos, transmitting both the elegance of their time and a hint of the turbulence yet to come.