Kelemen and Kocsis win prestigious 2013 Gramophone award

“They don’t come any better than Kelemen and Kocsis,” is how veteran music specialist Rob Cowan sums up the Hungarian violinist’s and pianist’s recording of the Bartok Violin Sonatas in his review accompanying the Gramophone award in the category of chamber music, Hirado.hu reports.

Barnabas Kelemen and Zoltan Kocsis and their Hungaroton recording faced tough competition, said Cowan. “The unprecedented abundance of top-grade Bartok violin sonata recordings throws both critics and collectors into a state of heady confusion,” he wrote on Gramophone’s website. “Kelemen and Kocsis can claim the best virtues of all these versions and add to them extra quotas of fire, intensity and a clinching sense of being rooted in the right soil, something that no other recordings achieve to quite the same degree.”

Hirado.hu said this year’s Gramophone Recording of the Year, presented in London on Tuesday evening, also lauds Hungarians in the form of the composers Bartok, Eotvos and Ligeti, whose violin concertos performed by Patricia Kopatchinskaja with Ensemble Modern and the Hessen Radio Symphony Orchestra are conducted by Peter Eotvos on the Naive label.

Gramophone Classic Music Awards 2013 – offical website.

Read the full review

Source: hirado.hu, Gramophone Awards