US-born violinist and conductor Karina Canellakis has a solid international reputation. It was
Simon Rattle who encouraged her to take up conducting. As of 2016, she was a guest conductor with orchestras around the world, having first won the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award. As of the 2019-2020 season, she has been appointed principal conductor of the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra for four years.
It was with this orchestra that she recorded Bartók's popular Concert for Orchestra. The Concert was commissioned by conductor Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The work came about under difficult circumstances. Bartók had fled Europe in 1940 because of rising Nazism. In New York, he was plagued by poverty and illness. In 1945, he died of leukemia. For Canellakis, the third movement, Elegy, is the heart of the Concert. 'It reveals the feverish nocturnal delirium of desire and nostalgia by which Bartók's inner experience was controlled,' Canellakis said. Also fascinating are the Four Pieces with which the CD opens. Four mysterious pieces reminiscent of the successive nightmares of Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle (HJ).more
