In 2012 the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Eugène Ysaÿe Competition, drawing on its extensive archive of unreleased recordings to put together a 4CD set containing 8 of the most celebrated violin concertos as performed by the laureates. Handsomely presented as a CD-book, with texts, photographs and reminiscences, it contains live recordings made between 1967 and 2005, which were painstakingly remastered in 2011 in order to ensure optimal sound quality for today’s listeners.

Founded in 1937, the first Ysaÿe Competition brought to Brussels a number of talented young violinists and the name of the first laureate shows just how high the standard was: David Oistrakh! After WWII, the Competition was revived in 1951, when it took the name of its patron Queen Elisabeth. The list of laureates over 75 years is dazzling: Kogan, Senofsky, Sitkovetsky, Laredo, Michlin, Hirshhorn, Kremer, Fried, Horigome, Repin, Znaider, Skride and Khachatryan, to name but a few.

The set opens in 1967 with the Paganini Concerto, played by Philippe Hirshhorn, a great artist and teacher, who died in 1996, but not before he had influenced several generations of musicians; the Elgar Concerto as interpreted by Gidon Kremer, has never previously ben available on disc; then there are performances by Miriam Fried in Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky from Vadim Repin in 1989 and an equally memorable performance of the Sibelius by Nikolaj Znaider from 1997, the same year as Kristóf Baráti’s superb Beethoven.

The compilation concludes with two laureates from the past decade: the Hungarian violinist Barnabás Kelemen playing Bartók and, finally, Belgium’s own Yossif Ivanov in the Shostakovich.

Contents:
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
– Concerto in D major Op.35
Vadim Repin (Russia, 1st prize 1989)

Jean Sibelius
– Concerto in D minor Op.47
Nikolaj Znaider (Denmark, 1st prize 1997)

Edward Elgar
– Concerto in B minor Op.61
Gidon Kremer (Latvia, 3rd prize 1967)

Nicolo Paganini
– Concerto No.1 in D major Op.6
Philippe Hirshhorn (Latvia, 1st prize 1967)

Ludwig van Beethoven
– Concerto in D major Op.61
Kristóf Baráti (Hungary, 3rd prize 1997)

Felix Mendelssohn
– Concerto in E minor Op.64
Miriam Fried (Israel, 1st prize 1971)

Dmitri Shostakovich
– Concerto No.1 in A minor Op.77
Yossif Ivanov (Belgium, 2nd prize 2005)

Bela Bartok
– Concerto No.2
Barnabás Kelemen (Hungary, 3rd prize 2001)