Artist: Christian Ferras, Herbert von Karajan, Pierre Barbizet, Carl Schuricht, Michel Schwalbé, Jean-Claude Ambrosini, Shuku Iwasaki, Berliner Philharmoniker, Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, George Enescu
Title: Christian Ferras Edition
Year Of Release: 2023
Label: Eloquence
Genre: Classical
Quality: FLAC (tracks)
Total Time: 15:25:43
Total Size: 3.91 GB

https://www.eloquenceclassics.com/releases-archive/christian-ferras-edition/

Several first-ever CD transfers in this newly remastered set celebrating a sublime exponent of the Franco-Belgian violin school.

Christian Ferras was just 15 when he first attracted attention in the international press for the premiere of Honegger’s Unaccompanied Sonata in 1948. He began making records for Decca the same year, including a brand-new concerto of Paganinian virtuosity by Federico Elizalde, and critics continued to be astonished by the combination of technical accomplishment with warmth of tone and a musical maturity far beyond his years.

Ferras continued to make records for Decca throughout his teenage years. They include little-known concertos by Rodrigo and Ivan Semenoff (an album produced in Paris by John Culshaw) and the first recorded testament to his long and fruitful partnership with the pianist Pierre Barbizet. Many of these recordings had been forgotten until recently; they are newly transferred here from the best-available sources.

The Ferras/Barbizet partnership brought unrivalled finesse to the Francophone sonata repertoire (Debussy, Faure, Franck and Lekeu, all represented here) but a Mozart sonata LP from 1954 is another forgotten gem. So is an album of Bach made under the supervision of Ferras’s teacher, Georges Enescu. By the early 60s, Ferras had won the admiration of Herbert von Karajan, and their DG recordings of repertoire concertos from JS Bach to Sibelius stand the test of time for a harmonious meeting of minds, dynamism and strength of mutual inspiration rare among the conductor’s many concerto partnerships.

Ferras’s career was derailed by episodes of depression and alcoholism which eventually led to his suicide in 1982, aged just 49, and the final recordings here are encore collections made in 1968 and 1971. By then he had relinquished his partnership with Barbizet, but these little-known ‘late’ albums find Ferras on undimmed and delightfully imaginative form, making a ‘wonderfully relaxing coda’ to this important anthology, as Tully Potter remarks in his booklet tribute. The booklet also includes an interview between Jean-Michel Molkhou and Julien Szulman, where they discuss the rediscovery of the rare 1971 album made by Ferras in Japan with Shuku Iwasaki, as well as the little-known 78-era recordings.