James Ehnes's outstanding Bartók series for Chandos continues with the early romantic Sonata BB 28 (1903), Hungarian Folk Songs and Romanian Folk Dances. The key work, however, is the unaccompanied ...

Brahms and Bartók make unlikely companions. In playing the Brahms concerto so introspectively and then focusing on the sense of mystery that opens Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1 Janine Jansen finds a ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. “Romantic” is not the first word that comes to mind with Bartók, but there is no mistaking the romantic influences ...

Isabelle Faust, as she explains in her excellent booklet notes accompanying this CD, has a particular penchant for the violin music of Bartók, fostered by her studies with a violinist who knew the ...

Banjo wizard Béla Fleck has crafted a fascinating career from infiltration. He's embedded his instrument in musical zones from jazz to classical to West African music. Now he's written himself a ...

In many performances of the Bartok Solo Sonata its legendary difficulty is more apparent than its beauty and nobility: the violinist sweats profusely in a cloud of resin dust, his bow reduced to a ...

Last year, Janine Jansen filled Auckland Town Hall playing Tchaikovsky with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, her performance melting all but the stoniest of hearts. The Dutch violinist's new CD ...

Coupling music by Brahms and Bartók makes enormous sense, given the former composer's penchant for Hungarian dance music. Janine Jansen's studio recording of Bartók's Violin Concerto No 1 makes a ...

Sir Yehudi Menuhin's second recording of Bartok's Second Violin Concerto under Antal Dorati (he made three with him in all, plus one under Furtwangler, now on EMI References, 10/89) was taped at ...

Isabelle Faust made her debut with Stuttgart's Bach-Collegium, recorded as part of the Hanssler label's reputable Bachakadamie edition. Moving to Harmonia Mundi in 2003 enabled the German violinist to ...

Bartók's two violin concertos were composed three decades apart, and Isabelle Faust here skilfully brings out the contrasts between youth and maturity, particularly in her detailed attention to the ...

The young Belgian violinist Yossif Ivanov (born 1986) here tackles two key 20th-century concertos, Bartók’s Second of 1938 and Shostakovich’s First, which was written in 1948 but kept in a drawer ...