Violin Sonatas

'Highly enjoyable … full of charm and wit … The playing is exemplary …Shaham and Erez make the best possible case for these pieces, duly wearing hearts on sleeve where appropriate' (International Record Review)

'Shaham's pungent, occasionally acidic string tone is perfect for Weiner's mixture of extravagance and cool … Great elegance and flamboyant ease' (The Guardian)

'Hagai Shaham plays with a large, richly Romantic tone and a feeling for the grand gestures in which the music delivers its message and the ethnic matrix from which it emerged. But he also has the virtuosic flair to put across the most flamboyant numbers' (Fanfare, USA)

'The excellent Israeli violinist Hagai Shaham and his accompanist of many years Arnon Erez (together they won the 1990 ARD Competition) have recorded Leo Weiner's two magnificent early violin sonatas…with such devotion and such a feeling for the sensual glow of this music that, from the very first bar, one is totally transfixed by the art of their musical seduction…Hagai Shaham links a perfect technique with the mesmerizing beauty of his fiery sound; he embodies the ideal Hungarian gipsy-violinist, the highly cultivated Prince Charming who will give it "his all" to cast a spell on his listeners…Nowadays, violinists with such charisma have become very rare and should therefore be especially cherished…the old-fashioned magic of Shaham's sound' (Stereoplay, CD of the Month)

agai Shaham has made himself the master of the Hungarian idiom which prevailed in much Romantic violin music. He now turns to a composer who was one of the leading figures of new Hungarian music in the first few years of the twentieth century, although largely forgotten now. Leó Weiner was regularly hailed as the great new hope of Hungarian music-in 1908 one critic prophesied that he was the Hungarian symphonist that everyone had been waiting for. But in fact he did not produce any symphonies, and it was in chamber music that he fully achieved his early promise.