This week Classical reviewer Geoff Adams reviews Paganini's 24 Caprices performed by James Ehnes and Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
Canadian violinist James Ehnes returns to music that launched his recording career - fiendishly difficult and famous works for solo violin.
He first recorded these Caprices in 1995 for Telarc.
Ehnes won an award last year for his Onyx disc of the Elgar Violin Concerto; he plays the whole set of 24 Caprices in immaculate and dazzling style, maintaining a clean and incredibly smooth sound (the 1715 "Marsick" Stradivarius undoubtedly helps) displaying a most refined sweetness.
Ehnes says these brevities are "the most enduring, influential and fascinating work from one of the most admired musicians of the early Romantic age".
It's hard to find a better performance - if only Paganini had recorded!
Highlight: Caprice No.24 has inspired other composers, most recently Andrew Lloyd Webber, to use its catchy theme.
This is a re-release of Herbert von Karajan's 1950 Vienna mono recording - the first that was made for the then-new LP medium.
Like its EMI predecessor on 78s (the 1934 Glyndebourne version), this recording omits all of the recitatives, leaving just Mozart's wonderful arias and group numbers, but it has been digitally remastered, in 1999.
It's a great classic performance with Erich Kunz (impressive as Figaro) and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in her youthful prime - wonderful singing by Sena Jurinac and others.
Karajan tends to take the orchestra at a cracking pace but it works.
Grumble: no decent booklet provided. You have to put the third disc into a computer to view 100 PDF pages for the opera's libretto and synopsis - most inconvenient!
Highlight: Schwarzkopf at her peak.
