Charlie Siem - Vaughan Williams and Grieg- Violin Sonatas (2023) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

The first-class pairing of Charlie Siem and Itamar Golan release their debut album with Signum; Between the Clouds invites the listener into a Parisian-styled ‘salon’ for an intimate performance of classic pieces for violin and piano.

Featuring pieces by Wieniawski (known for his Gallic elegance and Slavonic fire); the ‘wunderkind’ Godowsky; the Viennese master Friedrich (Fritz) Kreisler; the virtuosic Niccolò Paganini, and the mighty Sir Edward Elgar, this is certainly not one to be missed.

Ralph Vaughan Williams bridged the history of England’s sunset from Empire to Commonwealth. Musical revolution, two world wars, the New German School of Liszt and Wagner, Stockhausen, Boulez and the Darmstadt radicals framed his life. In the succession of major Anglo-Saxon composers, he commanded the high ground between Elgar and Britten, facing ‘the doubts and portents of a tragic age’ where his predecessor had ‘proudly’ summed up ‘the glories of the Victorian century’ (Bernard Shore). He has been called ‘the apotheosis of Englishness’, ‘the fountainhead of the … English national school’, a man ‘as English as Morley and Purcell’. In 1931, the year Constant Lambert staged Job at the ISCM Festival in Oxford, Aaron Copland, fresh from Brooklyn, jazz and Nadia Boulanger, arrogantly wrote him off as ‘the kind of local composer who stands for something great in the musical development of his own country but whose actual musical contribution cannot bear exportation … His is the music of a gentleman farmer, noble in inspiration but dull’. 15 years later, the critic Scott Goddard was to say: ‘There is no aspect of life foreign to him, none beyond the reach of his art; and that art, which is the most individual in the history of [British] music since Purcell, has reached a width of reference and a depth of comment never attained by musicians bred here … Nothing can be said conclusively about the workings of mind so protean and still magnificently active’. The ‘corpus of Vaughan Williams’s work will speak to generations of Englishmen of a great Englishman’s ranging thoughts, his love of the homely countryside, his piety, his inherited poetry, his adventurous mind and lofty ideals’ (Shore, 1949).

TRACKLIST

1. Charlie Siem - Violin Sonata in A Minor: I. Fantasia
2. Charlie Siem - Violin Sonata in A Minor: II. Scherzo. Allegro furioso ma non troppo
3. Charlie Siem - Violin Sonata in A Minor: III. Tema con variazioni. Andante – Tempo del preludio ma tranquillo – Cadenza
4. Charlie Siem - Violin Sonata No. 2 in G Major, Op. 13: I. Lento doloroso — Poco allegro — Allegro vivace — Presto
5. Charlie Siem - Violin Sonata No. 2 in G Major, Op. 13: II. Allegretto tranquillo
6. Charlie Siem - Violin Sonata No. 2 in G Major, Op. 13: III. Allegro animato
7. Charlie Siem - Peer Gynt, Op. 23: Solveig's Song (Arr. for Violin and Piano by Charlie Siem)



Thanks to the Original customer.