Accomplished Violinist Leonidas Kavakos Releases Album in Honor of Beethoven’s 250th Birthday

Leonidas Kavakos

Leonidas Kavakos Set to Release Beethoven First Album for Sony Classical 

Accomplished and admired violinist Leonidas Kavakos is set to release a double-CD featuring works specifically by Ludwig van Beethoven in honor of Beethoven’s 250th birthday.

The album, which is the first recording by Kavakos under the terms of his new exclusive contract with Sony Classical, was created to celebrate the legendary composer’s extraordinary works, with specific choices from each of Beethoven’s three creative periods. The recording is set to release on October 18. 2019. 

The most remarkable feat of this recording? Kavakos displays his skills as a “complete” musician, presenting as both the soloist and the conductor in this recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61. The album will also feature Septet Op. 20 as well as a miniature rarity, The National Airs with Variations, dating from 1817-1818. 

Kavakos, who was born in Greece in 1967, regularly performs with leading international orchestras and consistently works under the most high-profile conductors in our modern era. Further, Kavakos is a dedicated and passionate chamber musician, as well as a convincing advocate of the repertory for violin and piano. 

Kavakos is known for his lean tone, his emphatically clear and phrasing. As a musician heavily influenced by Beethoven’s works, he has his own, decisive view of the central piece in this album, the Violin Concerto. 

“The emotions in Beethoven’s music are extremely rich and personal,” Kavakos said. 

“They reveal a big heart that is filled with the courage to challenge the world. We encounter a man capable of being not only polite but also very coarse. His world is typified by inner conflicts and powerful confrontations. In my own view it is impossible to approach Beethoven by means of stylized emotions – ‘pure’, controlled and, as it were, disembodied intonation is not enough. Beethoven leaves the eighteenth-century perspective far behind him and looks resolutely ahead.”

Kavakos has been performing the Violin Concerto for many years under some of the world’s most eminent conductors, and yet, until now, a recording of this subsection of the repertory has been missing from his extensive discography.

Accompanying Kavakos on this recording is The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, one of the world’s most elite orchestras, as well as one of the most celebrated orchestras, especially noted for its remarkable players who have sensitive performance styles and flaunt the watchful alertness that’s normally associated with chamber music. 

The scheduled release date for the Kavakos album is set for October 18, 2019—it is available or pre-order and streaming.