New Recording - Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto
Tchaikovsky Album Feature
13th March 2008
JANINE JANSEN RECORDS FIRST EVER EXCLUSIVE CLASSICAL iTUNES SESSION
"Janine Jansen is the most exciting violinist of her generation - an artist for the iPod era."
Der Spiegel
Violinist Janine Jansen has created an exclusive download session EP for digital music audiences. The all-Bach programme called Live Session: Bach (Cat. No. 4780526) will be the first ever classical recording in the iTunes Sessions series. Janine Jansen has tailored the programme specifically for digital download by selecting powerful chamber pieces, having already proven that their combination of intimacy and immediacy is particularly appealing to the digital music audience.
Janine Jansen has been dubbed "Queen of the Downloads" (The Independent, UK) following the breakout success of her chamber-sized performance of The Four Seasons in 2005, which broke into the US Top 20 albums on iTunes, becoming that year's top-selling digital classical album, and it remains a digital best-seller 3 years on. Her latest album Bach Inventions & Partita once again topped the iTunes classical charts around the world.
The digital success story of artists such as Janine Jansen illustrates a trail-blazing dynamic for marketing and selling classical music online. Janine's prior recordings have already succeeded in building a digital audience beyond the traditional classical record buyer. The new recording Live Session: Bach presents a sensational new stride towards developing the audience even further.
The session also features Maxim Rysanov (viola) and Torleif Thed�en (cello), trio colleagues from Janine's recent Bach album Inventions & Partita, and her father Jan Jansen on harpsichord, who played with Janine in her best-selling album The Four Seasons.
JANINE JANSEN LIVE SESSION: BACH
Catalogue Number: 478 0526
US Release Date: 18th March
International Release Date: 21st April 2008
Chart News
Janine's latest album is the #1 classical album at iTunes in Germany this week and has jumped into the pop album charts at #36. Congratulations Janine!
» Click here to buy the album at iTunes Germany 7th November 2007
A Queen with a Pub
A new star on the horizon: Janine Jansen, born in the Netherlands, is the most exciting violinist of her generation � an artist for the iPod era.
This lady turns heads � tall, slim, beautiful. When she walks onto the stage � more often than not in a bright-red, off-the-shoulder dress with a daring backstrap arrangement � the audience is spellbound by her looks alone.
Yet Janine Jansen (29) has more to offer than just a beautiful body. She is the most exciting violinist of her generation � serious, possessing a highly distinguished artistry put over with relaxed focus. She has no need to build up a cult, her art says it all.
Born in Soest near Utrecht in the Netherlands, Jansen represents the new type of young classical musician with a thorough, all-round education, obsessed with perfection, and free from any attempt to strike attitudes.
Her flawless technique enables her refined tone to flow with seductive ease and power, her playing to impress as both spontaneous and energetic.
Critics and audiences throughout Europe are now realising what a huge talent has risen from the Dutch provinces onto the world stage.
Only a few weeks ago, the internationally-celebrated Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov was billed to perform in Munich but had to cancel at short notice due to injury. Janine Jansen was summoned to take his place and although the majority of the audience, few of whom had ever heard the name of his replacement, were understandably disappointed, her concert ended with a standing ovation and shouts of 'bravo'.
Throughout the English-speaking music world, however, Jansen has already become a household name. In the USA in particular she is on her way to pop star status, and is seen as the 'Queen of the Download' by the iPod generation. Hardly any other classical musician can register as many downloads: her recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for example, accounts for almost 73 percent of the total sales of this recording.
Yet Jansen nearly ended up studying a different instrument. She grew up in a musical family, her mother a singer and her father organist of Utrecht Cathedral. A model of the cultured middle-class family. Of course, as practitioners of domestic music-making, also an endangered species. All three children learned to play an instrument, subscribing to the family ambition of eventually forming an ensemble for piano quartets. The young Janine favoured the cello, but an older brother had got there first. No member of the family had yet chosen the violin, however, so this was the instrument towards which she was gently steered by her parents.
Soon after Janine started to practise at the age of six, her extraordinary talent emerged.
Her parents, she says, never forced her to practise. She adds that it was through making music with the family that she learned at an early age that listening to one another is what music is really about.
At the age of 16 she entered the Utrecht Conservatoire. In 1997 her debut performance at the world-famous Amsterdam Concertgebouw made her a star in the Netherlands. Ever since then her recordings have been guaranteed bestsellers in her home country.
However, Jansen follows a clever two-track recording strategy by performing crowd-pleasing concert classics such as the works of Mendelssohn, Bruch and � coming next � Tchaikovsky to the general public while maintaining a consistent involvement with chamber music, which she loves.
Just recently her record company, Decca, released an exquisite album for connoisseurs of classical music niche: J.S. Bach's Two- and Three-part Inventions. Although originally composed for the keyboard, Jansen approached these intoxicatingly intellectual works in an arrangement for string instruments. Together with viola player Maxim Rysanov and cellist Torleif Thed�en, she makes this intimate baroque music blossom.
The jewel of this recording is the second partita for solo violin with its famous final movement, the 'Chaconne', considered a test piece of violin virtuosity. In the eyes of experts anyone mastering this refined piece of musical architecture is among the greatest.
Jansen now gives around a hundred performances a year, a concert marathon, only pausing for breath between Christmas and the New Year. Over the last four years, however, this break has given her the time to stage her own chamber music festival in Utrecht. She invites musician friends to perform in small ensembles, always ending the series with her favourite event: a late-night concert on December 30 in a small pub in Vienna, The Broadway Piano Bar. This intimate venue was for years frequented by travelling classical musicians who would meet there for impromptu music-making with no closing time.
After the legendary pub was closed last summer, Janine Jansen lured its homeless proprietor to her Utrecht festival. There he hosts the final evening event when all artists let their hair down and improvise throughout the night. This, according to Janine Jansen, is life at its best. 3rd October 2007
The Bach Album
Janine's latest album is now available in the US and will be internationally released very shortly.
» Click here to read about these new recordings of Bach's two and three part inventions and also Janine's spellbinding solo Partita.
The new album has just entered the US Billboard classical chart at #3, and a special bonus video version of the album is topping the iTunes classical chart.
» Click here to go to to iTunes US store
Janine Jansen has won this year's NDR Music Prize for outstanding artistic achievement
Janine Jansen has won this year's NDR Music Prize for outstanding artistic achievement. It will be awarded to her by the Intendant of the NDR, Professor Jobst Plog on August 22 at the Schleswig Holstein Festival in Hamburg, where she is to perform with the Czech Philharmonic. The NDR prize is the latest in Janine Jansen's growing collection of awards. In 2003 she won the Dutch Music Prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture - the highest distinction an artist can receive in The Netherlands - and in 2004 and 2005 she received the Edison Classic Public Award. Last year she won an Echo Klassik Award for her recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons and she has won another Echo in 2007 for her recording of the Mendelssohn and Bruch violin concertos. December 2006
Concertos & Romance goes Gold!
Janine's newest album Concertos & Romance (featuring Mendelssohn and Bruch Violin Concertos) has already been certified Gold for sales in the Netherlands. Congratulations Janine! November 2006
Janine's debut album certified platinum
Janine Jansen's debut album has just been certified Platinum for sales in the Netherlands. Many congratulations Janine! October 2006
Janine awarded Echo Award
Janine Jansen has just been awarded the prestigious Echo Award for "Best Concert Recording of 2006". 13 October 2006
De langverwachte nieuwe cd van Janine Jansen ligt
vanaf 13 oktober in de winkels: Mendelssohn/Bruch - Concertos & Romance.
Op deze cd wordt Janine begeleid door het Gewandhausorchester o.l.v. Riccardo Chailly.
Deze vioolconcerten zijn Janine zeer dierbaar. Zij speelt ze al vele jaren en inmiddels met de beste orkesten van de wereld. Om dit repertoire met één van deze orkesten op te nemen was dan ook een feest voor haar.
Bijzonder op deze cd is ook de Romance voor altviool van Bruch. Janine speelt vaker altviool in kamermuziek, maar een solowerk met orkest op altviool was nieuw voor haar. Prachtige muziek op de voor Janine zo kenmerkende passionele wijze uitgevoerd.
Speciaal ter gelegenheid van het verschijnen van deze cd is er een concert in Het Concertgebouw georganiseerd op 20 november. Janine zal op deze avond beide vioolconcerten ten gehore brengen.
Het concert is helemaal uitverkocht, maar via universalmusic.nl maakt u nog kans op kaartjes voor dit unieke concert.
4th April 2006Janine Jansen - Queen of the Downloads
She's the violinist that classical fans want most on their iPods. But just who is Janine Jansen? Michael Church finds out.
Though people didn't realise it at the time, Radio 3's Beethoven week marked a turning point for the record industry: the 1.4 million free downloads of the symphonies made in the ensuing fortnight highlighted a trend that is growing at an exponential rate. And while Russell Watson and Andrea Bocelli are predictably high in the iTunes charts, the most prominent iTunes instrumentalist is a young Dutch fiddler named Janine Jansen. Sales of her new Vivaldi record are, says Decca's vice-president, Jonathan Gruber, a "digital phenomenon".
Why her? "I attribute it to many factors," he says. "It was a brilliant recording, which people have had a chance to experience in an immediate way. Buying it is just two clicks away from the image of the album. An album feature page on the iTunes site offers you the chance to learn a little about her and to listen to 30 seconds of very high-quality playing, and then to download a track for 99 cents. People find the whole package appeals to them - a fresh version of the work, from a fresh talent, presented in a new way."
Three-quarters of this record's sales have been digital, "but those have had a good effect on physical sales, too, as not everyone buys downloads. So the two sales modes are developing together - one doesn't substitute for the other."
The Vivaldi sales clearly depend on a number of hooks, only one of which is the quality of Jansen's playing: those images on iTunes play a big part. In one, she's pictured leaning seductively back in an armchair and tossing her violin over her shoulder, as though she has more exciting things in mind; in another, she poses provocatively on a carpet, her violin again an afterthought. We get the point, and Decca hear the ping of the cash register.
Back in the early Eighties, it was exciting enough to Western punters that a violinist should be a tiny, pretty infant, with talent as a bonus. When the nine-year-old Sarah Chang burst on to the scene, that excitement was offset by Yehudi Menuhin's ecstatic accolade, "the most perfect violinist I have ever heard". When Chang acquired feminine curves, marketing men presented her in an overtly provocative way; luckily, her playing was good enough to transcend that.
Then came the notorious Vanessa-Mae, whose playing had less potency than her looks. And after her was Leila Josefowicz, a first-class fiddler temporarily knocked off course by being made the face of Chanel's Allure perfume. Debate is currently raging over the Scottish prodigy Nicola Benedetti: she may have a £1m recording contract, but the critical jury is still out.
Jansen's sex-kitten marketing is par for the course, but in reality she's a tall, commanding 28-year-old with a down-to-earth manner that she ascribes, with a laugh, to her nationality. And she's a consummate musician. By never forcing her tone, she forces our close attention on every note; she shapes her phrases with infinite subtlety, and her sound can be as sweet, sad or sexy as the occasion demands. In chamber music, she's a natural leader, urging on her colleagues with fiery glances, in response to the cues in the score. She's also a leader in another sense: when she presented her Vivaldi Seasons at the Wigmore Hall last autumn, her father, brother and boyfriend, Julian Rachlin, were all playing in the band.
I ask her about her first musical memory. "All my first memories are musical - I remember nothing else," she replies. "My grandfather conducted a church choir, my father was his organist, and they used to give concerts every Saturday afternoon, so I was in church a great deal of the time. I was singing in the choir before I could read, standing next to my mum."
At home, the family made music all the time, with harpsichords, a piano and an organ filling every available space. "My elder brother played the cello, and as I looked up to him I wanted to play it too - and it's still one of my favourite instruments. But they decided it would be nice to have somebody playing a different instrument, so that we could play together.
"One day I went to a concert of children playing the violin, and became instantly hooked - I knew for certain that it was going to be my instrument. But that didn't stop me doing normal things, like playing soccer with the boys." Her English is impeccable, and her delivery measured.
She brushes away all talk of prodigies - "That word means nothing to me" - and disowns her touched-up commercial photos: "The promoters may see them as an image of me, but I do not." But when I ask how she has avoided the unsightly scar that most violinists collect under the left side of their jaw, she confesses to having once done some touching-up of her own.
"I can laugh about it now, but when I was 10, all the other young violinists around me had huge brown bruises, and I had none. So I got out my mum's make-up, and painted on brown eyeshadow to show I was like the others. My mum went mad - 'Are you squeezing your violin too much with your chin? You must be doing something wrong!' But it did look impressive."
Prodigy or not, her trajectory via the Utrecht conservatory has been uninterruptedly smooth, with honours and prizes raining down. Vladimir Ashkenazy was one of many conductors who were instantly smitten - "In my opinion, this young woman has everything." When one prize brought in some serious cash, she spent it all on lessons with the chamber pianist Menachem Pressler: "That man is pure receptivity - he is the music."
Meanwhile, her own chamber festival in Holland is thriving: "I wanted the freedom to make my own programmes, and to invite my favourite players. We hold it in December, when the concert season is over, and when it's family time. I said, 'Either it works, or nobody will show up.' But they did, so we've gone on."
At this point in our conversation, her face lights up: "Hey, there's Julian, just arrived from Brazil." He bustles over, looking smaller and more vulnerable than her. Then, after a tender kiss on the lips, she turns to me in triumph: "You see, it's true - we do fly to hear each other's concerts!" He goes off to sleep, and she talks on about their life together. When I ask if they are competitive, she firmly says no. But how do they manage not to be? "It never comes up."
How do their styles differ? She thinks hard, then: "We're both very passionate and direct in our playing, but we play Baroque music differently. He has more vibrato: his playing is more Romantic. Mine is more authentic - though I hate that word."
That seemingly effortless authenticity is what we get every time she puts bow to string on her 1727 Strad. Comforting news for Decca, even if their photos are not authentic. And good news for the Proms, where she'll doubtless appear this summer.
