To most, the names of the composers on this disc will be unfamiliar, but students of the violin will either smile or shudder in recognition. These men were violin pedagogues: some, such as Giovanni Battista Viotti and Charles August de Bériot, were historically important theorizers on the art of fiddle playing, but all of them wrote didactic concerti for the advanced beginner or intermediate student, little pieces that have been sawed away at by grade school age prodigies for a century and a half.
One can only guess, but the six-year-old Itzhak Perlman probably had less trouble with the Friedrich Seitz 'Schüler-Konzert' than most. He admits to having happy memories of all these works, and now he has returned to the classroom to give polished, authoritative performances of them. Appropriately enough, he is accompanied by the student members of the Juilliard Orchestra, definitely on their toes as they help him take the performance standard for this music to a higher than usual level.
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