Violinist Christian Tetzlaff moved to Finland's Ondine label with this 2011 release, perhaps reflecting the thinking of his new employer with the program. It combines the most standard of standard works, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, with two fairly unusual works by Schumann, the Fantasy for violin & orchestra, Op. 131, and the still rarer Violin Concerto in D minor, WoO 1. Both works were negatively impacted by the spreading word of Schumann's descent into madness, and the concerto was completely ...
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Violinist Christian Tetzlaff moved to Finland's Ondine label with this 2011 release, perhaps reflecting the thinking of his new employer with the program. It combines the most standard of standard works, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, with two fairly unusual works by Schumann, the Fantasy for violin & orchestra, Op. 131, and the still rarer Violin Concerto in D minor, WoO 1. Both works were negatively impacted by the spreading word of Schumann's descent into madness, and the concerto was completely suppressed by his successors. It was revived, ironically enough, in Germany in the 1930s after Nazi authorities banned the concerto by Jewish-born Mendelssohn. Thus, there is a kind of double linkage among the works on the album: the historical one, and the one that stems from the gradual rediscovery of Schumann's works of the 1850s: the way to appreciate them is to listen for the ways in which they avoid sounding like Mendelssohn, or even like earlier Schumann. The concerto's outer...
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