(by Jeffrey Dane)

Scheduled for release on the Naxos label in September, 2007 is a CD
recording of performances of the following works by Miklós Rózsa:

— Concerto for Violin & Orchestra, op. 24 (1953), and

— Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Cello & Orchestra, op. 29 (1966).

The CD will be released simultaneously in the United States and England, and elsewhere.

It was my privilege to have been given a preliminary copy of the recordings of these works, and the performances by all artists are in every sense superlative.

Both works, recently recorded in Moscow, are performed by the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dmitry Yablonsky. The cello soloist in the Sinfonia Concertante is Andrey Tchekmazov. The violin soloist in both works is Anastasia Khitruk. The originality of her playing is, in a word, phenomenal. The lucidity, precision, and note-for-note articulation in her performances actually transcend advanced technical achievement: they bring to her readings an absolutely extraordinary maturity and cohesive integrity of interpretation, her meticulous playing is riveting, and the clarity of her intonation is positively astounding. A new prose vocabulary would have to be invented to properly describe her music-making. She gives these two major Rozsa works new life and in a very real way makes them her
own.

Anastasia Khitruk will also be performing in a recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on October 1, 2007, in which the music of Miklós Rózsa will be on the program.

Parenthetically, this is the composer's centenary, and my book about him, A composer's Notes: Remembering Miklos Rozsa, is a recollection of the man as I knew him, and was published by iUniverse, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

[source: Jeffrey Dane; e-mail: Jeffdane43@aol.com]