PABLO DE SARASATE & NICCOLO PAGANINI Played by KIM SJØGREN & LARS HANNIBAL
Niccolo Paganini
Pablo de Sarasate
The moment the sharp melodic tones of this collection fall on the ears, life becomes measurably better. Like stepping out into the Spring garden, or an escape to the park after a 24 hour marathon tuned to virus news, these tunes will bring a lightening of the spirit. Put them on in the evening and have a meal. It is like transportation to a particularly elegant dining club. The sharpest conversationalist flags with a companion you’ve spent the past month looking at over the meal table. Music is the solution – and delightful violin and guitar arpeggios, precise evocative as perfect as playing can get, are the antidote to the blues. Time for the soul to rise above the latest mind-numbing update – this new unusual disc swirls the Victorian salon around, gives it a dash of Scandiwegian sparkle and offers the listener the kind of rhapsodic thrill of recognition that made its composers and arrangers the darlings of the known world a mere hundred years ago.
Lars Hannibal plays Guitar
Kim and Lars the two blondes smiley Danes who lean out from the publicity photograph with folksy ease -they look like the long lost brothers of John Denver. They are about as far as you can get in cultural terms from their brothers in music more than a century ago, Pablo Sarasate and Niccolo Paganini. On the album cover there they are - instruments in hand – their photographs from the mid -nineteenth century must have been among the first ever taken.
Yet although Paganini and Sarasate look sepia sombre, faded into fuzzy brown shadowy images – their work is as razor sharp on this CD as the day they played it for astonished audiences all over Europe. Pablo de Sarasate, was a violinist in a country stiff with guitarists. Born in Pamplona in 1844, his father was a military musician. Pablo was on stage as a performer at the age of 8. It was the start of a career that saw him in demand all over the world. The first pieces on this gorgeous CD are his interpretations of themes from Bizet’s Carmen. Unbelievably its composer never saw his opera a success. He died in penury, a disappointed man. Such is life, as Ned Kelly an exact contemporary said at his death, that now it is the most popular and played operatic work in the world Pablo de Sarasate must have helped put it on the road to renown. When Carmen was little known and seen as strangely modern, he saw its brilliance and pressed on with his Concert He became so brilliant and admired he toured through North and South America, the Middle East and Europe. In demand hardly covers it. He was a natural showman. The opening Carmen Fantasia op 25 on this disc is sublime, snatches of virtuoso violin with a cool rhythmic guitar base. Add the Spanish dances, 18 minutes of authentic vivacity and the mood is set. Upbeat skilled and full of life
Kim Sjøgren the brilliant Danish violinist
Niccolo Paganini, the famous Italian violin player, known best these days by his imitators ‘on a theme by Paganini’ crops up remarkably often. No wonder. His work as rendered by Kim Sjøgren is immediately a celebration. The opening Moses Fantasia on the G String recorded originally in 1988 in Herstedvester Kirke, it had lent itself brilliantly to a skillful re-master. The result? A nineteenth century triumph filtered through Danish musicians – helped along by a 1714 Stradivarius for Kim with a Lamy bow.
The resulting mélange of late twentieth century Danes with mid nineteenth century Mediterranean masters truly works well. It plays like a dream and bears sparkling repetition to transport the listener into a sound world of originality. Yes, it’s indulgent, the music is consistently thrilling, but what a boost to the spirits it is.
