This release arguably features the two greatest concertos ever written for the violin: performed by one of the most brilliant violinists of her generation, together with one of the finest orchestras,and under the baton of one of the world's foremost conductors.This recording of Tchaikovsky/Mendelssohn violin concertos bears witness to the eminence of the collaboration between violinist Arabella Steinbacher, conductor Charles Dutoit and PENTATONE's Orchestra of the Season January-June 2015, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the result thereof.

Announcing a rare new album conducted by Maestro Abbado – still much missed by many in the concert hall and the studio. Schubert remained one of Abbado’s favourite composers throughout his life and since his first performance in Den Haag in 1966 he returned again and again to the “Great“ C Major Symphony.

Following her critically hailed Deutsche Grammophon debut, Echoes of Time – and growing acclaim for her concert appearances – violin virtuosa Lisa Batiashvili meets every challenge of Brahms’s monumental Violin Concerto.
With maestro Christian Thielemann and the instrumentalists of the Staatskapelle Dresden, for whom German Romanticism is the birthright, Lisa Batiashvili’s elegant, eloquent artistry finds ideal partners. Meeting Thielemann exceeded all her expectations: “. . .his conducting was wild and fiery. At the same time I always had the feeling that I was being supported by the orchestra and that I had time to react.”

It is a sign of great artistry when performers can take a composer's lesser works and make them compelling. That Fischer and Helmchen have done so with Schubert's modest violin and piano works to such joyous effect is remarkable. The revelation comes when Fischer joins Helmchen at the piano in the sublime Fantasia.

Julia Fischer and Martin Helmchen adopt a rather quick tempo and a light touch, hardly too heavily pedaled in the piano part, in the opening of the first movement of Schubert's First Sonata in D Major, a work that could lend itself, slight as it may be, to overblown Romantic rhetoric (although not in leaner and more spirited readings like that of Joseph Szigeti, who recorded the Sonata with Andor F”ldes in 1942, a performance re-released in Sony's "Masterworks Portrait" series 52538 in 1992).