Search - Claude Debussy, Franz [Vienna] Schubert, Sergey Prokofiev :: Au Louvre

On this disc, recorded live during five concerts at the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, several world-class soloists come together for the intimate give-and-take of chamber music; unhampered by technical limitations, they revel in their collaboration, and the results are spectacular. The host is Russian violinist Vadim Repin; putting his consummate virtuosity and ravishing, variable tone entirely at the service of the music, he captures the Debussy sonata's colorful impressionism, rhythmic freedom, languid, delicate atmosphere, grotesquerie, and changing moods; the Schubert duo's charm and joyful radiance, lilting, flexible phrasing and rhythm, ardor and simplicity of expression. Berezovsky and Gothoni aid and abet Repin's unerring feeling for style and idiom. In Prokofiev's Sonata for Two Violins, Barachovsky takes the first part, but both players' sound is so rich and soaring, their brilliance so scintillating, their approach so exuberant and impetuous, that one cannot tell them apart. The bluesy movement from Ravel's sonatina sounds gorgeous, and the final Hungarian piece with a gypsy band is a wild, unbridled run-around. A must for violin aficionados. --Edith Eisler