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Product Description After completing his studies with Ivan Galamian and Christine Dethier,Jonathan Carney was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to continue hisstudies in London at the Royal College of Music. Now concertmaster of theBaltimore Symphony Orchestra, Carney is passionate about music educationand serves as artistic advisor for the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestras aswell as an Artist In Residence at the Baltimore School for the Arts, one of thecountry s premier high schools. Review Carney s playing ... featured his usual refinement of technique andinstantly communicative, consistently elegant phrasing. --Baltimore Sun (live performance review)
This is an odd CD release; it contains a work, Romantic Pieces, for violin and piano, another, Terzetto in C, for two violins and viola, and the well-known Dumky Trio for violin, cello, and piano, but nowhere are the performers of these pieces identified. Instead, the CD case and liner notes refer to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London and its onetime conductor Jonathan Carney, as if the CD contained orchestral music, which it does not. Are we to assume that unidentified members of the RPO are the unacknowledged performers on this recording? Despite this, the performances are actually very fine ones overall.Dvorak wrote two works in 1887 for the unusual combination of two violins and viola, with the intention of performing them with an amateur violinist and his teacher, with Dvorak himself on the viola. Dvorak soon after recast one of these into the Romantic Pieces, Op. 75b, for violin and piano, and that is the form in which they're usually heard today. They are relatively simple but very effective pieces, with melodic beauty that reminds one of Schubert's songs. I own a recording of Isaac Stern performing these pieces with Robert McDonald as pianist. No one can match the silky sound of Stern's violin, but otherwise the performance by the unknown violinist is actually the more inspired one, with more dynamic range and dramatic emphasis than Stern manages.The Terzetto, Op. 74, has the form of a miniature string trio, with an Introduzione, Larghetto, Scherzo, and Tema con Variazioni, all quite beautiful and melodic. The last movement is a set of variations on a harmonically unusual theme. This is probably Dvorak's finest set of variations, residing in this infrequently performed work. I own a recording by the Vlach Quartet Prague which takes a rather slow reading of the Terzetto. The present one uses considerably faster tempos but doesn't lose sight of the melodic qualities of this music. The Vlach Quartet's performance tends to drag by comparison.The Dumky Trio, composed in 1891, doesn't follow the usual four-movement pattern of a classical trio. Instead, it contains six movements, each in the form of a dumka. (The dumka is a slavonic music form consisting of alternating contemplative and lively sections.) The fourth movement opens with an unforgettable melancholy theme on the cello with a rhythmic accompaniment by the violin and piano, somewhat reminiscent of Schubert's andante from his Trio in E-flat, but here alternating with brilliant faster sections in the major. Dvorak gives each of these dumka movements its own unique character.The Dumky Trio has been recorded by many groups over the years. I think one of the finest recordings is that by the Beaux Arts Trio in their collection of all the Dvorak trios. The unknown players on the present recording can't quite match the fine Beaux Arts performance, but they come surprisingly close.In summary, this CD contains very good to excellent performances of some of Dvorak's most heartfelt music. The sound quality is also excellent. It's a shame that we don't know the identity of the performers!