Antje Weithaas releases CD with works by Khachaturian
Born in the Georgian capital Tiflis, the Armenian Aram Khachaturian was, besides Sergej Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the most important Soviet composers of the 1930-50s.
In the 1960s, Aram Khachaturian engaged in a number of experiments in which he covered terrain situated at an astonishing distance from the immediately appealing tone of the works that he had composed prior to those years. These experiments included the first of his three concert rhapsodies, in which he completely emancipated himself from the established forms that he had filled out in his concertos for piano, violin, and violoncello, which already then were world famous.
While the virtuosic ambitions of the rhapsodies are in no way inferior to the technical demands of their older sister works, he now requires what is perhaps an even higher measure of expressive shared experiencing and solo messaging.
The direct juxtaposition of the two concert violin compositions recorded by Antje Weithaas and Daniel Raiskin and the Rhineland-Palatinate State Symphony Orchestra conveys the extraordinarily grand leap into a »modernism« that hardly anybody would have thought possible for the author of the Sabre Dance.
With this recording, Ante Weithaas continues her collaboration with the label cpo. In September 2019, cpo already released a CD with the Violin Concerto by Robert Schumann and the Double Concerto for Violin, Violoncello and Orchestra (Violoncello: Maximilian Hornung). The orchestra on this recording is the NDR Radiophilharmonie under the baton of Andrew Manze.
