Violinist Isabelle Faust is featured on a disc of German violin concertos that marks the début recording for harmonia mundi by the great Italian conductor Claudio Abbado. Abbado is the artistic director and principal conductor of Orchestra Mozart, an ensemble based in Bologna. They team up here for Berg s haunting Violin Concerto, subtitled To the Memory of an Angel. The work is dedicated to the memory of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler, who died of polio in 1935. The pairing is Beethoven s immortal Violin Concerto, a work of rare beauty that, surprisingly, was not a success at its first performance. It was an 1844 concert featuring Joseph Joachim and Felix Mendelssohn, well after Beethoven s death, which revived the work and made it a permanent and beloved part of the violin account of the Berg that plumbs its depths of melancholy, setting off a radiant, life-affirming performance of the Beethoven... --Gramophone, Recording of the Month

These performances of two landmark violin concertos demonstrate a remarkable meeting of interpretative minds, a way of imagining and conveying the music that is absolutely hand in glove... Berg s concerto... is handled exquisitely... Abbado establishes an atmosphere that can embrace delicate wisps of texture, poetic reverie, heartfelt intensity and the anguish that builds to a climax in the second movement. Faust s timbre and spectrum of emotion are similarly judged and communicated with arresting maturity and sensibility. Likewise, she echoes the freshness and depth that Abbado stimulates in the orchestral playing of the Beethoven concerto, finding a mode of expression that is both lyrical and dynamic and contributing to a performance of real stature. --The Daily Telegraph, CD of the Week

Abbado and Faust give us light-fingered Beethoven: airy, colourful, muscular but never muscle-bound... The luminous sound of Abbado s orchestra, a continuing glory, infuses the concerto with a real sense of joy; I don t know of any other interpretation that wears such a smile so lightly. Faust is a wonder on this disc, but Abbado is even more so. --The Times

• Performer: Isabelle FaustOrchestra: Orchestra MozartConductor: Claudio AbbadoComposer: Alban Berg, Ludwig van BeethovenAudio CD (February 14, 2012)SPARS Code: DDDNumber of Discs: 1Format: ImportLabel: HARMONIA MUNDI