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Songbird (Ioudenitch/Broberg)

Maria Ioudenitch (violin), Theresa Pilsl (soprano), Kenny Broberg (piano) (Warner Classics)

Our rating

4

Published: May 16, 2023 at 12:46 pm

5419737407_Loudenitch

Songbird Schubert: Fantasie in C, D934; plus works by Amy Beach, N Boulanger, Glinka, Medtner, F Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, C Schumann, R Schumann et al Maria Ioudenitch (violin), Theresa Pilsl (soprano), Kenny Broberg (piano) Warner Classics 5419737407 65:14 mins

Violinists often dream of sounding like singers, and for her debut album – the prize for winning the Joseph Joachim International Violin Competition in 2021 – violinist Maria Ioudenitch has taken her love of the human voice as her inspiration. Playing on her 1691 Guarneri, in a rather resonant acoustic, the Russian-born American finds a beautifully golden, vocal quality in her playing that harks back to an earlier age. It makes the recording glow with warmth, matched by pianist Kenny Broberg’s sensitive partnership. The recital programme itself is made up of a well-chosen selection of 19th- and-20th-century pieces, some more familiar than others. Several of the works are songs, thoughtfully transcribed. Ioudenitch captures both the limpid melancholy and passionate anguish of Rachmaninov’s ‘Don’t sing, my beauty, for me’, for example, while in Fanny Mendelssohn’s ‘Erwin’ it’s almost as if Ioudenitch is speaking through her violin. Nadia Boulanger’s ‘Soleils couchants’ is a welcome rarity.

Others are already songs-without-words. We hear Romances from both Clara and Robert Schumann, and a number by Amy Beach that offers an American companion to Elgar’s salon pieces. Two Medtner pieces sound as if they had been written for violin and piano rather than simply piano alone. And if the programme looks rather bitty on paper, it builds to the more substantial four-movement Schubert Fantasie in C, intelligently played.

What of the ‘Songbird’ of the title? Well, there’s Glinka’s L’Alouette (The Lark). And, in a lovely finishing touch, we hear just how like a voice the violin can be in Strauss’s Morgen, featuring Ioudenitch alongside the radiant soprano of Theresa Pilsl.

Rebecca Franks

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