Sibelius / Glazunov: Sibelius & Glazunov: Violin Concertos

Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Philharmonia Orchestra join violinist Esther Yoo on this 2016 Deutsche Grammophon recording pairing two late-Romantic violin concertos: Glazunov’s Violin Concerto in A minor and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D minor, filled out with Sibelius’s Suite for Violin and String Orchestra and Glazunov’s Grand Adagio from the ballet Raymonda.

Yoo’s connection to the Sibelius concerto is a particularly direct one, she became the youngest-ever prize-winner of the International Sibelius Violin Competition in 2010, at just 16 years old, an event that first brought her to wider international attention. Her career built quickly from there: a London debut in 2014 performing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 under Lorin Maazel at the Royal Festival Hall, and, that same year, a run as soloist on the Philharmonia’s South America tour under Ashkenazy, the same partnership captured on this recording.

About the programme

Pairing Sibelius’s concerto with Glazunov’s is a natural fit beyond the personal Sibelius connection: both works sit at the Romantic-into-modern turn of the 20th century, share a soloist-forward virtuosity, and were written within a few years of each other (Sibelius’s in 1904/05, revised 1905; Glazunov’s in 1904). Rounding out the disc with Sibelius’s smaller-scale Suite for Violin and String Orchestra and Glazunov’s Grand Adagio gives listeners a lighter contrast to the two big concertos, without straying from the same late-Romantic sound world.

A note on this page

No independent critic review of this recording survived in any archive we could recover, the original page carried only the label’s own promotional summary, not a genuine mmmusic critique. Rather than present that promotional text as if it were an independent review, the text above has been written fresh from verified facts about the recording and its performers.