musica assoluta, Paavo Järvi, Isabelle Faust, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Christian Tetzlaff, Sharon Kam – Thorsten Encke: A Portrait (Live) (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

musica assoluta, Paavo Järvi, Isabelle Faust, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Christian Tetzlaff, Sharon Kam - Thorsten Encke: A Portrait (Live) (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz] Download

musica assoluta, Paavo Järvi, Isabelle Faust, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Christian Tetzlaff, Sharon Kam – Thorsten Encke: A Portrait (Live) (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:10:28 minutes | 618 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © CAvi-music

A Portrait oft he composer Thorsten Encke „When you embark on an artistic project, structural considerations can serve as a spark of inspiration. Like an architect, you roll out a blueprint, jot down a series of notes, and establish a basic framework of interval relations. Then you thoughtfully furnish the interior by relating motifs to one another and assigning them dramatic roles within the musical narrative. All of this is certainly necessary. But then, new ideas take you on detours, unplanned inspiration imposes itself on your thoughts, and the structural spark of inspiration dwindles with each new effort. The work acquires a life of its own; it wants to grow beyond its former limits. As an artist, you have to surrender and try to sense where the journey leads you.
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Isabelle Faust, Anne-Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov – Schumann: Piano Quartet – Piano Quintet (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Isabelle Faust, Anne-Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov – Schumann: Piano Quartet – Piano Quintet (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 54:40 minutes | 1,92 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

In his Piano Quartet and Quintet, Schumann revisited the frameworks inherited from Schubert and Beethoven to create astonishingly innovative structures. Their grandiose musical and emotional gestures place these works among his supreme achievements. The prestigious artists assembled here, with their extensive experience of performing Schumann’s chamber music and concertos, do full justice to his imaginative world.

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Isabelle Faust – Schumann Piano Quartet- Piano Quintet (2023) [24Bit-192kHz] FLAC [PMEDIA] ⭐️

Isabelle Faust - Schumann Piano Quartet- Piano Quintet (2023) [24Bit-192kHz] FLAC [PMEDIA] ⭐️ Download

Isabelle Faust – Schumann: Piano Quartet – Piano Quintet (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 00:54:40 minutes | 1,91 GB | Genre: Classique, Musique de chambre
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover

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Isabelle Faust – Solo: Matteis – Pisendel – Biber – Guillemain – Vilsmayr (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust – Solo: Matteis – Pisendel – Biber – Guillemain – Vilsmayr (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:27 minutes | 1,00 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

From Biber’s famous ‘Guardian Angel’ Passacaglia to Guillemain’s ‘Amusements’ and sonatas and fantasias by Matteis (father and son), Pisendel and Vilsmayr, Isabelle Faust offers us a panorama of European music for unaccompanied violin from the second half of the Baroque era. Dreamy or virtuosic, these pieces bear witness to the diversity of inspirations from Italy, France, England and the German-speaking countries – and to their marvellous intermingling echoes.

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Isabelle Faust – Solo Matteis – Pisendel – Biber – Guillemain – Vilsmayr (2023) [24Bit-96kHz] FLAC [PMEDIA] ⭐️

Isabelle Faust - Solo Matteis - Pisendel - Biber - Guillemain - Vilsmayr (2023) [24Bit-96kHz] FLAC [PMEDIA] ⭐️ Download

Isabelle Faust – Solo: Matteis – Pisendel – Biber – Guillemain – Vilsmayr (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 00:54:27 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover

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Isabelle Faust, Il giardino armonico & Giovanni Antonini – Locatelli: il virtuoso, il poeta (Violin Concertos & Concerti Grossi) (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/176,4kHz]

Isabelle Faust, Il giardino armonico & Giovanni Antonini – Locatelli: il virtuoso, il poeta (Violin Concertos & Concerti Grossi) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/176,4 kHz | Time – 01:08:20 minutes | 2,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Locatelli was one of the most impressive violin virtuosos of the first half of the eighteenth century. Considered today as a sort of Baroque Paganini, he left picturesque, colourful, strikingly modern pieces for his instrument. A few years after a Mozart collaboration that earned them worldwide acclaim, Isabelle Faust and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico bring out the full narrative intensity of these concertos, worthy of the operatic stage!

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Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov, Pablo Heras-Casado, Freiburger Barockorchester – Schumann: Violin Concerto, Piano Trio No.3 (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov, Pablo Heras-Casado, Freiburger Barockorchester – Schumann: Violin Concerto, Piano Trio No.3 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:36 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

In the autumn of 1851 Schumann composed, in rapid succession, the two violin sonatas and, in the space of just seven days from 2 to 9 October, the Piano Trio no.3, Op.110. As always during his work, Schumann was oblivious to everything around him, neglected social obligations, and isolated himself – even from Clara. ‘Robert is working very assiduously on a trio for piano, violin, and cello,’ she confided to her diary, ‘but he won’t let me hear anything of it until he has quite finished it – all I know is that it’s in G minor.’

This trio, like all his other chamber works with piano, was tailor-made for Clara to play and right from the first rehearsal session in the domestic circle she went into a veritable frenzy of delight: ‘It is original, absolutely full of passion, especially the scherzo, which sweeps one away to the wildest depths’, Just a little bit of that same enthusiasm would probably have spared the Violin Concerto a great deal of opprobrium: Clara witheld the score, as did the dedicatee, Joachim. It was finally premiered in Berlin on 26 November 1937, more than 80 years after it was composed, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm and the violinist Georg Kulenkampff. Yehudi Menuhin had the privilege of making the first commercial recording, produced in the following year, 1938, with the New York Philharmonic under its British principal conductor John Barbirolli.

This first volume in a trilogy comprising the complete concertos and piano trios of Schumann brings together two late and unjustly neglected works. The instigators of the project, Isabelle Faust, Alexandre Melnikov and Jean-Guihen Queyras, champion their cause with a force of conviction and a choice of instruments that restore the delicate transparency and subtlety of their textures. The next release will be of the Piano Concerto and Piano Trio No. 2.

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Isabelle Faust – Ondřej Adámek: Follow Me & Where Are You? (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Isabelle Faust - Ondřej Adámek: Follow Me & Where Are You? (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Isabelle Faust – Ondřej Adámek: Follow Me & Where Are You? (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:01:01 minutes | 607 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BR-Klassik

Born in Prague in 1979, the composer, conductor and chorus master Ondrej Adámek, who studied in his Czech hometown and in Paris, has already won numerous prestigious awards for his orchestral, chamber, vocal and electro-acoustic music. In his musical language, which also repeatedly incorporates elements of distant cultures, he creates unusual musical narratives. He seeks the authenticity of his interpretations by combining voices and movements, gestures and theatricality, phonetic and semantic aspects, and his own specially developed musical instruments.
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Isabelle Faust – Bach: Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, vol.2, BWV 1001-1003 (2012) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust - Bach: Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, vol.2, BWV 1001-1003 (2012) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Isabelle Faust – Bach: Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, vol.2, BWV 1001-1003 (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:20 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Following up on the 2010 release of Volume I of J.S. Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin, which covered BWV 1004-1006, Isabelle Faust presents BWV 1001-1003 on the second volume, her 2012 release on Harmonia Mundi. For the first installment, she garnered critical acclaim and popular praise for her unstinting scholarship and unparalleled virtuosity, and the same applies to the long-awaited completion of the project. As in her previous performances, Faust uses the manuscript as her source and is careful to get all details right, while finding the proper balance between Bach’s expression and her own. Faust plays a Stradivarius violin from 1704, nicknamed “Sleeping Beauty,” and her tone is pure and radiant, despite some unavoidable but minimal scratchiness on double-stops, and she has a slight vibrato that she uses sparingly, almost as embellishment, in keeping with Baroque practice. The sonatas and partitas are virtuoso works where everything is exposed and a violinist’s abilities are put to the ultimate test, not only in managing technical difficulties, but also in imagining the sounds, ornaments, textures, timbres, and nuances that Bach implies in his writng. Faust is one of the few artists to withstand the toughest scrutiny, and her set is highly recommended for her extraordinary fidelity to the music and true artistry.

Review by Blair Sanderson
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Isabelle Faust – Bach : Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, vol. 1 (BWV 1004, 1005, 1006) (2010) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust - Bach : Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, vol. 1 (BWV 1004, 1005, 1006) (2010) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Isabelle Faust – Bach : Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin, vol. 1 (BWV 1004, 1005, 1006) (2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:55 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

“Clapton is God!” was the well-known graffiti scrawled across 20th century London, praising the Englishman’s fiery guitar playing. Based on Isabelle Faust’s blazing accounts of Bach’s sonatas and partitas on this 2010 Harmonia Mundi disc, one might expect to see the graffiti “Faust is God!” scrawled across 21st century Paris. Rather than play all six of these canonical works of the solo violin literature, Faust has chosen the D minor and E major partitas and placed the C major Sonata between them. All three are tremendously difficult both technically and expressively, but starting with the D minor Partita with its celebrated Chaconne was particularly audacious. Faust rises to the challenge with an utterly devastating account of the work. Playing with only a dab of vibrato but a boatload of virtuosity, she overcomes every technical hurdle in this surpassingly difficult work. She saves the best for last, and her Chaconne is stunningly powerful, as well as amazingly nuanced and profoundly moving. Her other two performances are equally impressive, especially the opening Adagio and Fugue from the C major Sonata, which builds from a whisper to a shattering contrapuntal climax. There have been other great recordings of these works, but Faust’s surely belongs among the best. Harmonia Mundi’s sound is close but not overly intimate.

Review by James Leonard
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Isabelle Faust, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Harding – Bartók: Violin Concertos No. 1 & 2 (2013) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Harding – Bartók: Violin Concertos No. 1 & 2 (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:57 minutes | 902 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Isabelle Faust’s first recording for harmonia mundi, Bartok Sonatas, won her a Gramophone Young Artist of the Year. Here she returns to Bartok, perfoming the two concertos, accompanied by Daniel Harding and the Swedish Radio SO.

Such is the fame of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto (1937-38), that it has virtually eclipsed the First, written 30 years before. Yet, this earlier work, rediscovered long after the composer’s death, has a fascinating story all of its own. True to form, Isabelle Faust has gone back to the multiple musical sources of this First Concerto, a work that came ‘straight from the heart’, as Bartók’s romance with a young violinist lay at the core of its creative process.

‘I owe my enthusiasm for the music of Béla Bartók to the wonderful Hungarian violinist Dénes Zsigmondy, who was privileged to know the composer personally. At the age of eleven, I was lucky enough to study the Sonata for solo violin with him and thus to discover Bartók’s world in a very emotional and instinctive way. In the years since then, Dénes Zsigmondy, his conception of music, and especially his interpretation of Bartók have formed an important component of my artistic career. It seemed only logical to choose the Bartók sonatas for my debut CD. I am now delighted to present the two violin concertos in this recording. It is intended as a musical expression of my admiration for the composer Béla Bartók and my gratitude for the continued inspiration and faithful friendship of Dénes Zsigmondy. My warm thanks go to László Somfai and László Vikárius of the Bartók Archives in Budapest and to Felix Meyer of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel for their generous support of this project. Finally, I would like to express my profound appreciation of and indebtedness to Daniel Harding and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra for their absolutely fantastic contribution to the recording sessions.’ (Isabelle Faust)

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Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano & Violin, Vol. 2 (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano & Violin, Vol. 2 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:22 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Using period instruments, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov breathe new life into these ‘sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment’, a tradition Mozart renewed from within, blazing the trail for Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. The first volume was widely praised:

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Isabelle Faust, Kristian Bezuidenhout – J.S. Bach: Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust, Kristian Bezuidenhout – J.S. Bach: Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:27:35 minutes | 1,80 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

The six Sonatas for Violin and Obbligato Harpsichord BWV 1014-1019 (“obbligato” – compulsory – means the keyboard is fully scored, as opposed to basso continuo for which only the bass is scored, the rest being left to the discretion of the performer, who improvises) are some of these works that Bach kept revisiting and reworking. The oldest remaining source – from around 1725, through one of his nephews – already highlights the will to make these compositions evolve by refining them with successive adjustments. The work underwent another overhaul in Agricola’s manuscript, around 1741, while a copy made around 1750 by Altnickol reveals a third cycle status. An observation made by the musician’s second youngest son, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach – “He wrote these trios just before his end” – seems to have been interpreted as proof that Bach was still working on these sonatas in the last years of his life. This new recording by Isabelle Faust, a great specialist of baroque interpretation, and Christian Bezuidenhout on the harpsichord, discretely reveals the extraordinary richness of these works’ three-voice writing, that resembles the format of a trio sonata.

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Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov – Weber: Sonatas for Piano & Violin, Piano Quartet (2013) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov – Weber: Sonatas for Piano & Violin, Piano Quartet (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:09 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

The unjustly neglected piano quartet (J76) was completed in September of the year 1809, which the 22-year-old Weber spent in Stuttgart. It was originally offered to the publisher Hans Georg Nägeli, but he rejected it, advising the composer that it created wanton ‘confusion in the arrangement of its ideas’ and indeed too obviously imitated the ‘bizarreries’ of Beethoven. However, the work was issued a year later by the Bonn firm of Beethoven’s friend and admirer Nikolaus Simrock, whose ears were more receptive to the peculiarities of the score than Nägeli. And in the following year, 1811, Simrock once again stepped into the breach in the matter of the publication of the Six Violin Sonatas (J99–104). These were written to a tight deadline in the late summer of 1810, on commission from the Offenbach publisher Johann Anton André, who had in mind a collection of short pieces of moderate difficulty for the domestic music-making of the upper middle classes. Unhappy with the concomitant artistic limitations, Weber took the commission only half-heartedly and repeatedly complained during the compositional process of this ‘swine of a job’, which cost him ‘more sweat than the same number of symphonies’. His annoyance was all the greater when André rejected the finished work out of hand because it did not correspond to his expectations.

When Simrock finally published these pieces in Bonn in two instalments under the title ‘Progressive sonatas for fortepiano with obbligato violin, composed for and dedicated to amateur musicians’, with the opus number 10, Weber had only remotely followed André’s specifications. It is true that the technical demands on the performers, especially the violin, are fairly modest, but in terms of content the 6 short two- or three-movement sonatinas far outstrip mere pedagogical intentions.They were written to please amateurs, but quite as much to satisfy connoisseurs of any era.

Isabelle Faust follows up the success of recent recordings for hm [Bach volume 2, Berg and Beethoven with Claudio Abbado] with regular partner Alexander Melnikov and her brother Boris, currently principal viola of the Bremer Philharmoniker, and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt of whom Mstislav Rostropovich has said: ‘Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt is one of the leading cellists of his generation, of our time’.

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Isabelle Faust & Alexander Melnikov – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano & Violin, Vol. 3 (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Isabelle Faust & Alexander Melnikov – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano & Violin, Vol. 3 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:03 minutes | 1,38 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

By modifying the balance of the dialogue between the two protagonists, whom he turns into genuine alter egos, Mozart leads the genre of the sonata for fortepiano and violin onto the road to modernity. Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov present here the third volume of an exciting complete set on period instruments. Their playing, showing “great elegance and utter rigour”, is distinguished by “a tender and delicate expressiveness served by exceptionally subtle nuances” (Classica).

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