RHYTHM AND TEMPERAMENT

“Carolin Widmann is a fabulously assured and poetic soloist, taking minute care over the smallest, apparently most insignificant details,” wrote the British newspaper The Guardian. Her repertoire combines the classics with music by contemporary composers who have often written works specifically for her. “One can only understand the old when one understands the new and the other way around,” the artist explains. She appears with the world’s top orchestras including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and with such conductors as Sir Simon Rattle, Riccardo Chailly, and Daniel Harding. She recently made her debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Finnish conductor Essa-Pekka Salonen, and this year she is returning to the Berlin Philharmonic to perform a violin concerto by her brother, the composer, clarinettist, and conductor Jörg Widmann, who was the artist-in-residence for the 2021 Prague Spring Festival.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a child prodigy, and his early works astonished Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. In the 1930s he moved to the United States, where he became one of the founders of Hollywood film music as we now know it, and he became the first composer to win an Oscar. In America, he also wrote his Violin Concerto in D major. The virtuosic composition is especially remarkable for its wealth of melodic beauty. About his own concerto, the composer wrote that it was “contemplated for a Caruso, rather than a Paganini”.