Janine Jansen BRAHMS - BARTOK 1

Two landmark concertos receive sensational performances in Janine Jansen’s latest recording for Decca, set for international release in November 2015. The Dutch violinist, described by The Times as “a player you follow wherever she leads”, presents her profound insights into Johannes Brahms’s monumental Violin Concerto and youthful Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1. She recorded the Brahms with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Bartók with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano. Jansen’s past Decca releases have achieved astonishing success in the digital music charts, earning her the title of “Queen of the Download” (Independent) and No. 1 positions in the iTunes pop and classical charts.

Janine Jansen first performed Brahms’s Violin Concerto with Antonio Pappano in 2012, developing a visionary interpretation of the work over the course of eight concerts.

“I remember feeling very excited to be working with him, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer passion and energy that he generates from an orchestra,” she recalls. “Most especially he encourages a singing, radiant cantabile.”

The violinist and conductor returned to the score in February 2015, expressing its magical blend of lyrical beauty and symphonic power in three performances recorded live in vibrant high-definition sound by Decca.

Jansen is the first major artist to couple the two works on the same album. “To me they seem a natural pairing,” she observes.

Janine Jansen’s Decca recording of the Brahms concerto can be heard in the soundtrack of Public Works (Publieke werken), a major new Dutch feature film scheduled for release on 10 December 2015. Public Works is based on Thomas Rosenboom’s eponymous novel, set in the 1880s, about an Amsterdam violin maker, his nephew, a country pharmacist, and simmering tensions within late nineteenth-century society.

Brahms was inspired to create his only violin concerto in the summer of 1878 by his old friend, the violinist and composer Joseph Joachim. The work includes fiendishly difficult passages written to suit Joachim’s long fingers and a finale filled with the energy and spice of Hungarian gypsy music. Bartók’s first violin concerto, written in 1907-08 but not published until the late 1950s, also includes elements of traditional music from the composer’s native Hungary. Its strongest influence, however, proved to Steffi Geyer, the strikingly beautiful young Hungarian violinist with whom Bartók was deeply in love. (Decca Classics)