This unusual recital disc is aptly summed up by Ernest Gilbert in his brief but useful notes: "This is music making," he wrote, "on a highly personal, yet supremely musical level that truly harkens back to that increasingly evanescent Golden Age." Haendel was a child prodigy in the 1930s, and the program offered here on the occasion of her return to her hometown of Chelm in Poland is a forum for virtuoso display of another era. The music demands force of personality, which the 78-year-old Haendel has in abundance. One of ...
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This unusual recital disc is aptly summed up by Ernest Gilbert in his brief but useful notes: "This is music making," he wrote, "on a highly personal, yet supremely musical level that truly harkens back to that increasingly evanescent Golden Age." Haendel was a child prodigy in the 1930s, and the program offered here on the occasion of her return to her hometown of Chelm in Poland is a forum for virtuoso display of another era. The music demands force of personality, which the 78-year-old Haendel has in abundance. One of the instrument's very few female stars of her era, Haendel had a fascinating life that included, at one point, playing Bach's unaccompanied violin works for British troops in the field during World War II. She later lived in the U.S. and Canada, performing everything from standard repertory to Dallapiccola, but here she performs the big showpieces she must have learned as a teenager: Sarasate, Tartini, Wieniawski. She may have lost a step, a tiny step, at 78, but it doesn't matter --...
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