Romantic Violin Favourites

Franz [Vienna] Schubert (Composer), Georges Bizet (Composer), Fritz Kreisler (Composer), Christoph Willibald Gluck (Composer), Edvard Grieg (Composer), Percy Grainger (Composer), Russian Traditional (Composer), Irish Traditional (Composer), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Composer), George Frederick Handel (Composer), Antonin Dvorak (Composer), Franz Joseph Haydn (Composer), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Composer), Robert Schumann (Composer), Wolf Harden (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Wolf Harden
• Composer: Franz [Vienna] Schubert, Georges Bizet, Fritz Kreisler, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Edvard Grieg, et al.
• Audio CD (June 25, 1993)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Naxos
• ASIN: B0000013KM
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #74,548 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #78 in Music > Classical > Opera & Vocal > Vocal Non-Opera > Songs & Lieder > Folk Songs
  • #83 in Music > Classical > Instruments > Reeds & Winds > Oboe

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining hour of transcripted music, October 9, 2004

By 

Leslie Richford (Selsingen, Lower Saxony) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Romantic Violin Favourites (Audio CD)

Takako Nishizaki, violin, and Wolf Harden, piano, recorded these transcriptions by Fritz Kreisler in Francfort between 1982 and 1984. Most of the pieces were originally popular orchestral movements, and Kreisler transformed them into bite-sized chunks for violin with piano accompaniment either as 'encores' for his concerts or as 'fillers' for the B-sides of his 78 RPM records. They were obviously not intended to be heard together as a programme, but nevertheless this CD provides an hour or so of fine entertainment with well-known melodies galore, and it only takes a touch of the 'random' or 'shuffle' button on one's remote control to re-order the programme and get a few surprises. The recording is, by Naxos standards, excellent, Miss Nishizaki standing prominently on the left and the piano less prominently in the centre.

Of course, one could have reservations about Kreisler's manner of treating the romantic repertoire. He is known to have, on occasion, passed off his own compositions as the works of others, and Keith Anderson, in his liner notes, points out that Kreisler was the first famous violinist to introduce the constant use of vibrato, to avoid the use of the whole bow and to consider practice as a 'bad habit'! That was almost enough to turn me off this music before I had even heard it (I love 'historical performance practice'), but on second thoughts I suppose Kreisler himself is now history and deserves a faithful rendering just as much as the composers he himself loved (and falsified). Takako Nishizaki is probably an ideal interpreter, having devoted herself to Kreisler and produced a complete edition of his solo violin works. The young Wolf Harden is an accompanist, no more, but the end-result is a relaxing one that needn't be taken more seriously than one would take Kreisler himself.