This CD features German star violinist Christian Tetzlaff with virtuoso Romantic concertos by Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann. The Mendelssohn Concerto is one of the most frequently performed violin concertos of all time, with an unfailing popularity among audiences. Also included is Schumann’s more seldom recorded Fantasy for Violin and orchestra, which he completed shortly before writing the Concerto. One of Schumann’s last significant compositions, the long-lost Violin Concerto saw its première performance only in 1937, and was hailed by Yehudi Menuhin as the “historically missing link of the violin literature.”

With this disc, German label Neos takes on an enterprising project, Bruno Maderna: Complete Works for Orchestra, Vol. 1. Outside of Italy, Maderna is recognized as a significant figure within Italian avant-garde associated with Nono and Berio, but his music is not is well known as theirs, apart from his fanciful and hip Serenata per un satellite (1969). Within Italy, Maderna is remembered as one of her greatest conductors, although he is worshipped to such extent in that role that his compositions have been overlooked. Such a series, hopefully, would serve to redress the balance; Maderna's experience as conductor helped inform his compositions, and by having access to his orchestral pieces one might be able to determine to what extent his composing impacted his work as a conductor.

At a time when many of his contemporaries were exploring more fluid structures, Franz Schmidt while perhaps stretching tonal harmony to its limits, continued to embrace 19th-century form and achieved a highly personal synthesis of the diverse traditions of the Austro-German symphony. His language, rather than being wedded to a narrative of dissolution and tragedy is radiant and belligerently optimistic and reveals this scion of largely Hungarian forebears as the last great exponent of the style hongrois after Schubert, Liszt and Brahms.