Liya Petrova / Odense Symphony Orchestra / Kristiina Poska PROKOFIEV Violin Concerto No. 1 - NIELSEN Violin Concerto

After Liya Petrova won joint first prize at the 2016 Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition, jury President Nikolaj Znaider declared he had been 'absolutely blown away by how she had absorbed the Nielsen violin concerto - how it had become hers'. From her debut album on Orchid Classics you can hear just why she made such an impression on those who heard her performance. The Strad praised the 'iron will' Petrova brought to Nielsen's concerto; a fortitude which is matched on this recording by the sensitivity in her approach to the first violin concerto of Sergei Prokofiev.

Andrew Rangell FROM THE EARLY 20TH...

Andrew Rangell, who has previously recorded J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Eastern European folk music for the Steinway & Sons label, now turns his attention to composers of the early 20th century for his latest album release.

The centerpiece of the album is Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, whose “monumental cussedness, tenderness, and imaginative daring epitomize the character and gifts of its Yankee creator,” in Rangell’s words. Rangell makes the work his own through several idiosyncratic executional decisions, including playing on piano the optional viola part at the end of the “Emerson” movement; using his own forearm instead of a block of wood for the black-key tone clusters in “Hawthorne”; and in “Thoreau,” whistling the optional flute solo. “I hope there may be, in this species of self-reliance, something of Emerson,” writes Rangell.

Framing the Concord Sonata are three shorter works from Ives’ contemporaries, including the final piano works of Arnold Schoenberg and Carl Nielsen; and George Enescu’s “Carillon Nocturne,” written at the same time as the Concord, and which Rangell sees as a spiritual counterpart to Ives’ “Thoreau” meditation.