Idyll: Serenades by Janácek, Elgar, Kalinnikov

Elgar, Edward, Janacek, Leos, Kalinnikov, Vasily

Orchestra da camera "Ferruccio Busoni"

95199

This is a unique coupling on record, but a perceptive and satisfying one: a trio of Romantically inclined serenades from composers of Northern Europe, writing in the last decades of the 19th century when the drive to define a Nationalist spirit through culture was at its height. And so these works are distinctively, variously Russian, Czech and English in their different ways, while never relinquishing a debt to the German tradition in which their composers were to a greater or lesser degree educated. The Serenade by Vasily Kalinnikov is a single-movement Andantino. Light on its feet, with a waltz-like flow and much delicate pizzicato writing, the Serenade plays with a single theme full of spring-like freshness and optimism. There is a more complex structure and wider range of expressive moods to the multi-movement works by Janáček and Elgar, but they are relatively early works, both informed by long practical experience as a violinist. Elgar’s Serenade is a miniature masterpiece, with a deeply felt central slow movement, and one of his first fully assured works, even if his regular publishers Novello declined to print it because ‘We find that this class of music is practically unsaleable’.

Works:
• Elgar: Serenade for Strings in E minor, Op. 20
• Janáček: Idyll for String Orchestra
• Kalinnikov, Vasily: Serenade for strings

CD x 1

Brilliant Classics

2019-11-13

5028421951997