CCMusic.com

After years of heartfelt requests, Thomas Albertus Irnberger has granted our wish and made us very happy with his Sibelius project. T. A. Irnberger's concept of combining a great violin concerto with chamber music works by the same composer follows the unpretentious idea of a complex presentation of a composer rather than the joint presentation of "great" violin concertos on one CD - which does not make Sibelius' violin concerto any smaller. Here presented in collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Doron Salomon, it is one of the six or seven most-performed concertos in the violin literature and, with it's turbulent genesis at the beginning of the 20th century, one of the great works of late Romanticism. The elaborate revisions and new versions have given the work a stringency that is hard to resist. The following violin miniatures on this CD, recorded with Irnberger's busy piano partner Michael Korstick, were composed in the later years between 1905 and 1929.