Fougstedt and Andrade

Fougstedt and Andrade

Fougstedt and Andrade | £10
Pelléas et Mélisande Suite (extracts)
Symphony No.7
Violin Concerto with Janine Andrade

Nils-Eric Fougstedt was a favoured Finnish conductor of Sibelius’s music. The Pelléas et Mélisande Suite extracts and the Seventh Symphony were broadcast in 1953. The Violin Concerto was released on a 10” Decca LP c. 1959. It did not have wide circulation in Europe. It is now a collectors’ item and has great rarity value.
The soloist was Janine Andrade, one of a number of French female violinists whose careers flourished after the end of the war. One of her contemporaries was Ginette Neveu, whose recording of the Sibelius concerto in 1946 became widely admired. Neveu died in a plane crash in 1949. Andrade’s career won critical praise until a catastrophic stroke in 1972 brought an end to her public life. She spent the last years of her life in a nursing home and she died in 1997.

The Seventh Symphony recording is the only preserved performance by a Finnish conductor which represents the Finnish performance tradition in this work before Sibelius died in 1957. There are no recordings by Robert Kajanus, Tauno Hannikainen, Armas Järnefelt or Georg Schnéevoigt. It is, therefore, an important addition to the early recording history of this late work.

The remastering transfers onto CD from the original LPs have been done by Mark Obert Thorn.

The CD has a note written by Edward Clark