Concerto for Orchestra / Concerto for Violin and Orchestra

'Olivier Charlier surmounts these [technical demands] with absolute security, maintaining his characteristic sweetness of tone.'
The Strad

'The composer, an experienced conductor secures fine performances: Olivier Charlier evidently fell more than a little in love with Schurmann's violin lines in his Concerto; the BBC Philharmonic play splendidly and are admirably recorded.'
Gramophone

This is a most satisfying release, very thoughtfully directed by the composer from the podium and with Chandos' usual top-notch production control.'
Tempo

Schurmann's Concerto for Orchestra is characterised by its Bartókian influence; pentatonicism; gamelan music plus strict tempo relations, based on Elliott Carter's system of 'metric modulation'.

The first performance of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, in 1974 was received with great enthusiasm. The Guardian said of the music: 'The lyricism recalls the concertos of Gerhard, Henze and Berg, but the actual quality remains intensely personal, almost, I felt, confessional'. Ruggiero Ricci, the work's dedicatee, praised the concerto's idiomatic violin writing: 'I love it violinistically because it is singing in character.'

Olivier Charlier has had numerous successes in some of the most prestigious international violin competitions and has performed as soloist with many leading orchestras.He has recorded Dutilleux's Violin Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic under Yan Pascal Tortelier and Roberto Gerhard's Violin Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Matthias Bamert for Chandos. Both discs were award winners.

The composer-conductor Gerard Schurmann was born in 1924 in Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies. His mother, the daughter of Hungarian parents who settled in The Netherlands, had studied piano with Bartók in Budapest. In 1945 the Dutch-speaking Schurmann became acting cultural attaché to the Dutch embassy in London, and in 1948 he took up the position of resident conductor with the Dutch radio in Hilversum for two years, initiating a distinguished conducting career which he pursued alongside his composition studies with Alan Rawsthorne. Schurmann lived in Britain until his move to Los Angeles in 1981.

Schurmann was introduced to the violinist Ruggiero Ricci in 1974 by their mutual friend John Ogden, for whom Schurmann had written his Piano Concerto in 1972-3. The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was written to celebrate Ricci's golden jubilee as a performer. Schurmann's experience on the podium can be seen in the care with which he plots the relationship between orchestra and soloist, who never has to shout to be heard above the orchestral tutti.

Schurmann's Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned by Lorin Maazel and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra as part of that orchestra's centenary season in 1996. The composer honestly admits that the work was composed in the shadow of Bartók's, to which here and there he pays tribute with deliberate hints of Bartók in the scoring. The sound of the gamelan is there too, along with a new and explicitly American quality in the orchestration.

PREVIOUS RELEASES:
Schurmann: Six studies of Francis Bacon, etc. - CHAN 9167
Dutilleux: Violin Concerto etc - CHAN 9504
Lalo: Violin Concerto etc - CHAN 9758