http://www.janinejansen.com/ Sun, 05 Feb 2012 02:03:07 +0100 Janine Jansen News en-us http://www.janinejansen.com/images/rrs.gif http://www.janinejansen.com/ http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#108 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#108 Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100
The Violin Concerto No 2 is usually a quizzical work, full of heavenly moments framed by Prokofievian parentheses. Jansen, minutely attuned to every resinous contribution from the orchestra, played it on the edge, its wisps of melody amplified into elegiac fervour, as if every phrase was just about to drain away into nothingness.

Had it not been so sensitively done, and so carefully attuned to the orchestral fabric — there was a heavenly little moment for violin and oboe in the first movement, a duet I’ve never heard so well highlighted before — it might have been overheated. But Jansen is a player that you follow wherever she leads. In this case, that was on to the ferocious final movement, where she shrugged off the robotic clang of the castanets (one thing is always constant of Prokofiev: his talent for taking the mick) to charge for the final, desolate pizzicato. This concerto may sound curiously empty, but this time that very emptiness had tragic weight.]]> http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#107 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#107 Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#105 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#105 Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#104 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#104 Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100
Partly, this was due to her so sweet “Barrere” Stradivarius. But more, it was the way this young artist respects her music. The first movement was a marvel of nuance, lightning-quick responses, immaculate phrasing. Equally, Ms Jansen took the final rondo not with headlong velocity but with an appreciation for every little melody, including a respectful rendering of the Turkish parody.
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Jansen's playing was full of personality – and, under Osmo Vänskä's meticulous direction, the orchestra matched her at every step, from the soft-grained string opening, through the whispered slow-movement accompaniments, to the colourful wind solos in the finale. Vänskä had worked to draw a characterful Tchaikovsky sound from the orchestra, and this never once relaxed into anything generic. So it was apt that Jansen chose another orchestrally backed piece as her encore: the Mélodie from Tchaikovsky's Souvenir d'un Lieu Cher, arranged for violin with string accompaniment and played by Jansen with velvet tone and old-fashioned poise.]]> http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#98 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#98 Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100
[...]

The cool temperature was particularly noticeable coming after the Tchaikovsky concerto. Here, Vänskä fashioned an orchestral tapestry of elegant precision, with particularly engaging woodwind decorations from the principal flautist, Jaime Martin. But the orchestra’s neat colours faded away under the burning torrents of notes emanating from Janine Jansen’s violin. Looming above the orchestra like the Shard at London Bridge, Jansen made us her devoted slaves right from her curling opening phrases and her gorgeously hushed treatment of Tchaikovsky’s main theme. Is there any violinist extant with a more ravishing pianissimo, who lets the notes sing with such flowing magic and sunshine caress? Not on Wednesday night, anyway.

My constant fear with Jansen is that in her performing passion she’ll end up in one concert missing the strings and drawing the bow across her hair. But I’m sure her hair sounds gorgeous too. And beyond the concerto’s virtuoso fireworks, with fingers moving faster than light, she always found ample room for the piece’s quieter pleasures – none more pleasurable than the Canzonetta’s opening, so exquisitely fragile and tender. No rubbish this, or travesty.]]> http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#97 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#97 Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100
“Melancholie geeft muziek diepte. Er zit blijkbaar iets in me dat verdriet of een bepaalde pijn wil voelen in muziek. [...] Ik wilde vooral dat deze box oprecht persoonlijk zou zijn. Alle muziek die hier is samengebracht, is heel belangrijk voor mij – nu, of vroeger. Ik wilde ook dat de selectie afwisselend zou zijn.” – Janine Jansen

NRC-redacteur Mischa Spel interviewde Janine Jansen ter gelegenheid van het verschijnen van Carte Blanche.

De box zal verschijnen op 18 november 2011. ]]> http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#96 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#96 Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100
No less inventive and finely focused in both their playing and programming, the Dutch violinist Janine Jansen and her fine piano partner Itamar Golan brought Grieg, Messiaen and Ravel to the Wigmore, together with Three Pieces by Richard Dubugnon, the Swiss composer whom Jansen regularly champions. The last of these pieces pays tribute to Ravel and his house of toys and automata: Jansen probed the very inside of the composer’s imagination in the dream-world of his Violin Sonata in G — a real Midnight in Paris moment.

The pair’s Grieg C minor Sonata, too, was particularly impressive: quivering with tension and rhythmically impassioned dance, yet with Jansen’s characteristic silvery finesse guiding and guarding its heartbeat.]]> http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#95 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#95 Sun, 09 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#94 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#94 Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100
this unique prize package includes:

- KLM world-wide tickets to New York
- a meet and greet with Janine Jansen in New York
- concert tickets for two at the Carnegie Hall in New York on December 7th 2011
- a 3 nights stay at the Radisson Martinique hotel from Dec 6th – 9th
- a Samsung PL120 dualview camera

To enter the sweepstakes, click the photo above]]> http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#92 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#92 Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0100
5*

In the world of female fiddle virtuosity, the Dutch violinist Janine Jansen has long stood apart.

Before she took control of her career she had to endure sex-kitten marketing, and she became the first classical big-hitter in the iTunes charts, but somehow she’s remained uncontaminated. The key to this may lie in the fact that she was initially not a supercharged prodigy but a member of the family chamber-group: her passion for ensemble playing has led to her record big orchestral works with small groups of instrumentalists. Her performances are always finely judged, her sound always immaculate, and she never plays to the gallery: chaste is the word which best sums up her art.

The prospect of her playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Violin Concerto in D major’ had ensured that every seat for Prom 71 was sold. Her one concession to showbiz was to make a statuesque appearance in a flame-like saffron ball-dress, but from the moment her bow touched the strings she was consumed by the music. She delivered the themes of the opening movement with a warm, full sound, dominating the orchestra so discreetly that she and they might have been an ensemble of equals. The intonation in her cadenza was dazzlingly pure, and when the orchestra came gently back in, the ambient hush she had created round herself seemed barely disturbed.

She evidently knows – as many players do not – that a small but well-focused sound carries better in this acoustic than any amount of barnstorming, and she wove a ravishing pianissimo spell with the second movement’s wistful folk-song. As expected, her encore came from a Bach solo partita: a Sarabande, flawless and exquisite.

But with Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra she had the ideal partnership, and the rest of the Prom allowed them to show what a world-beating band they are. They opened with a martial rendering of Sibelius’s protest-song for his emergent nation, ‘Finlandia’, but their piece de resistance was a magnificent performance of Rachmaninov’s ‘Symphonic Dances’. Composed in 1940 for an earlier incarnation of this same orchestra, this work was to be the composer’s swansong, and Dutoit and his players invested it with a lovely blend of Russian nostalgia and Forties American optimism. Winding up with Ravel’s ‘La valse’, they then blew us away.]]> http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#93 http://www.janinejansen.com/newspressitems.php#93 Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0100
While Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances stayed just the right side of Ben Hur, sleek but never smug in their cinematic excess, it was the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto that everyone had come to hear. Janine Jansen, relegating recent Proms memories of Mutter, Midori, Shaham, even Tetzlaff into the slightly foggy middle distance, brought such presence and melodic focus that even the never-quite-silent Proms crowd seemed to catch the stillness at the heart of her technical whirlwind.

Hers is a very finished sound – the match of the highly polished Philadelphia Orchestra string section – and even in the folkier passages of the Moderato assai there was nothing left to expressive chance. It’s a technique so supreme as to suffer occasionally in the recording studio where her personality can get lost beneath its shield, but here in the Royal Albert Hall she drew us all to her with the fragility of her Canzonetta which never took its hand from the melodic rope through the labyrinth, turning the whole movement into a single cantilena of ever-unfolding sound.

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