Search - Patrick Wood, violin :: Thomas Baltzar: Complete Works for Unaccompanied Violin

British-Mexican violinist Patrick Wood studied as a postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and holds a BA and MA with honors in Modern Languages from Oxford University. He began to play the violin in Mexico City as a pupil of Icilio Bredo, later studying at the Royal Academy and with Erick Friedman and Eugene Drucker in the United States. As a soloist and chamber musician, he has performed widely throughout Europe and the US, at venues such as St. John's Smith Square (London), the Lausanne Academy (Switzerland), Sala Radio Television España (Madrid), the Saalbau in Neustadt-an-der-Weinstrasse (Germany), the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall (Troy, NY), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), the Art Museum (Philadelphia), the Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C.), and Merkin Hall (New York City). Mr. Wood has performed under the direction of Mstislav Rostropovich, Sir Colin Davis, and Christopher Hogwood, among others. He has performed in public masterclasses with Ruggiero Ricci, Erick Friedman, Igor Oistrakh and Pierre Amoyal. He is a regular performer with the Berkshire Bach Society, appearing as soloist alongside artists such as Eugene Drucker of the Emerson Quartet, Carol Wincenc, Aldo Abreu and Kenneth Cooper. His chamber concerts in the Musica Viva Festival of New Jersey have been broadcast across the United States on WWFM the Classical Network, and his performance of Saint-Saens' Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso has been heard in the UK on BBC Radio. Mr. Wood has served as concertmaster of New York Philomusica, is a soloist and Concertmaster for the Vermont Mozart Festival, and performs with the New York Chamber Soloists. From 1989 to 1997, Mr. Wood was a member of The English Mozart Players, as both soloist and Concertmaster with the group in the UK and throughout Europe. Baltzar s solo violin music presents two extraordinary innovations. The last four pieces on this recording are examples of scordatura, the technique of tuning the violin s strings to unusual pitches for a particular sonority. Baltzar s use of scordatura is among the very first outside of Italy. The second innovation is polyphonic music for solo violin, a style which he either created on his own, or at the very least an idea he raised to an unprecedented level of complexity and sophistication. There is evidence to suggest that he transferred some of the English viol idiom (which was more chordal) to the violin, but this evidence dates from the latter part of his life, and doesn t account for the singular impact of Baltzar s playing immediately upon his arrival in England. This recording gathers all of Baltzar s existing solo violin works from several sources, some printed and others in manuscript; it is a step towards making the music of this exceptional and innovative musician better known. Let us hope there is more.