Shostakovich Violin Concerto No.1, Britten Violin Concerto : Ehnes(Vn)Karabits / Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

After a series of critically acclaimed recordings on Onyx - most recently his recordings of violin concertos by Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky - James Ehnes teams up with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and it's charismatic music director Kirill Karabits in concertos by Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich. An early work, the Britten was completed in the September of 1939 just as World War II broke out. The work is an emotional commentary on the senselessness of war. The first of Shostakovich's two violin concertos was composed in 1948 for David Oistrakh. It had to wait until 1955 for it's premiere due to a ban on serious music by the notorious Zhdanov Conference and Party Decree of 1948. After Stalin's death in 1953, Shostakovich was finally able to exert his artistic freedom. The concerto is a truly symphonic work in scale - grand, dramatic and cast in four movements with a huge cadenza placed before the finale, in which the sun bursts out in a brilliant helter-skelter coda.