Sergei Prokofiev:
Five Melodies, Op. 35b

Karol Szymanowski:
Mythes, Op. 30

Maurice Ravel:
Pavane pour une infante défunte (Arr. for Violin and Piano by Paul Kochanski)

Olivier Messiaen:
Fantaisie

Erich Wolfgang Korngold:
Four Pieces from the Incidental Music to Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing", Op. 11

The musically and technically highly demanding programme, with which Stefan Hempel and Daniel Seroussi make their audite debut, offers an impressive panorama of the development of literature for violin accompanied by piano from the first third of the twentieth century. While the great works of the nineteenth century from Beethoven and Mendelssohn to Brahms and Tchaikovsky focused on melodic power and virtuoso brilliance, the compositions performed here by Korngold, Szymanowski, Prokofiev and Messiaen, written between 1915 and 1933, open up new expressive spheres for the instrument. The intensity of Hempel’s and Seroussi’s interpretations illustrate that the violin, no less than the piano, is a universal instrument which effortlessly does justice to the diversity of the idioms of musical modernism.

The programme is complemented by the transcription of Ravel’s famous piano piece Pavane pour une infante défunte by the Polish violinist Paul Kochanski and – as a bonus track available for download – Gabriel Fauré’s melancholy Morceau de concours of 1903.

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Recording: October 21 - 24, 2021, KulturKirche Nikodemus, Berlin. Stefan Hempel plays a violin by Nicolo Gagliano, Naples, of c.1760.