Schönberg: Violin Concerto

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The concert was recorded January 25th 2023, in Gothenburg Concert Hall, with violinist Ava Bahari and conductor Pekka Kuusisto.

In 1936 Schönberg completed his only violin concerto and he dedicated it to his devoted student Anton Webern. But the music was found so difficult to play that it lay unperformed for four years before Louis Krasner (who also premiered Alban Berg’s violin concerto) and conductor Leopold Stokowski dared to take the plunge. Even after that, the concert has been a rare guest on the stages. It has sometimes been said that it requires six fingers. Nor does the orchestra escape easily in this uncompromising, delicate and very precisely notated work, where each note is a carefully weighed detail of the whole. As rare as it is on concert programs, it is just as carefully studied by music theorists, who have here a splendid example of fully developed twelve-tone music.

The violinist Ava Bahari was born and raised in Gothenburg. She started playing the violin at the age of three and a half and has been a student of Per Enoksson, former first concertmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony. In 2015, Ava Bahari got a youth scholarship at the Stenastiftelsen and was able to start her studies at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin.