Piston: Violin Concertos / Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra

Rosette (Highest Rating) Penguin Stereo Guide

* * * * * 5 Stars - BBC Music Magazine (Sept 99)

Editor's Choice - Gramophone Magazine (Oct 99)

Critic's Choice Gramophone Magazine 1999

"Piston was one of America's leading late Romantic composers and his First Violin Concerto of 1939 deserves more frequent hearings. This disc provides the chance to familiarise oneself with this attractive piece. The Second Concerto (1960) is interesting and the 1970 Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra is a worthy filler. Buswell, a professor at the New England Conservatory, displays a feel for this passionate music and is excellently supported by the National Symphony Orchestra of the Ukraine."
- Sunday Tribune, Dublin (Ian Fox), September 5, 1999

"It is quite extraordinary that a work as inspired as Piston's First Violin Concerto (1939) should not already be in the standard repertoire alongside the Barber, with which it has much in common, including a comparable profusion of individual, lyrical melody. The second subject of the first movement persists in the memory until, most engagingly, it is rhythmically transformed to become the secondary theme of the riotous Rondo finale. The Second Concerto is more elusive, but its opening is no less haunting. The first movement is a two-part structure, developing two ideas, one sinuously 'expressible', the other pungently rhythmic and angular. The extended Adagio introduces a clam and very beautiful theme which is later to form a canonic duet with the flute. The Fantasia is a late work, first performed in 1973. Ruminative and searching, its language is more dissonant. It may seem remarkable that these works should be given their CD début by a Ukranian orchestra, but they play the music with security, splendid commitment and feeling. James Boswell, who studied at Juilliard, is a superbly accomplished, dedicated and spontaneous soloist, and the recording is first class." Penguin Guide (Key Recording)