Janine Jansen plays Prokofiev

Janine Jansen has been a top-selling artist since her debut recording in 2004 for Decca sold 300,000 records. A major star in Europe, especially the Netherlands, Jansen has frequently topped the classical charts and featured in the pop charts.

For this release, Jansen is accompanied in the concerto by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under its Russian-born Principal Conductor Vladimir Jurowski. When she played the work with the LPO in London as part of its 2012 "Prokofiev: Man of the People?" festival, The Times hailed her as "a violinist who is right now on matchless form … a player that you follow wherever she leads"

Composed in the mid1930s, on the eve of his return to the USSR, Prokofiev's much-loved Violin Concerto No.2 boasts the same accessible tunefulness and emotional directness as his enduringly popular ballet Romeo and Juliet, whose love music is ravishingly recalled in the soaring, songlike lyricism of the concerto's slow central movement. For contrast the concerto is coupled with two chamber works conceived in the same decade: the stark yet expressive Sonata for Two Violins (1932) and the darkly tragic Violin Sonata No.1 (1938-46), which constitutes the composer's covert memorial to those many friends and colleagues lost during Stalin's Great Terror and the subsequent World War.