The South Korean Suhyun Kim (viola) studies concert performance at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main, the Ukrainian Ievgeniia Iermachkova (piano) is a lecturer at the International Music Academy Anton Rubinstein in Düsseldorf.
BRIDGE: Pensiero exhibits that brooding melancholy mood characteristic of the composer's chamber music. The Allegro appassionato is dominated in its frame sections by a moment of rousing energy and rapturous sonority, which contrast with a nostalgic-sounding middle section.
ENESCU: His concert piece for viola and piano was written in 1906 for a competition. It is a lyrical rhapsody whose viola part, however, demands virtuoso skills from the player - Enescu himself had been a violinist (and pianist) prodigy. The one-movement work mixes elements of French impressionism with those of Romanian folklore.
R. SCHUMANN: Schumann composed the two-part work for "pianoforte and horn", published in July 1849 as Adagio and Allegro op. 70 by Friedrich Kistner in Leipzig, but already there he left the option of a version with "ad libitum violoncello or violin" as an alternative.
CLARKE: Rebecca Clarke is today considered one of the most important British composers of the interwar period. Trained as a violinist and especially as a violist - she was a pupil of Lionel Tertis, the most important violist of his era - she was one of the first women to be appointed to a professional orchestra, the Queen's Hall Orchestra, which opened the "Proms" concert series. She submitted her three-movement Sonata for Viola and Piano, written in 1919, to the composition competition in Berkeley for the "Coolidge International Prize" and won second prize among a large number of competitors, although it was probably only the unusual circumstance that she was a woman that led to the first prize being awarded to the composer Ernest Bloch.
