Elena Denisova

Elena Denisova is a Russian violinist who studied with Valery Klimov and Oleg Kagan. She became an Austrian citizen in 1992. She is the founder of the Classic Etcetera Music Association and the Gustav Mahler Ensemble and has been the director of the WoertherSee Classics Festival since 2002. She describes herself as a »passionate ambassador of the magic of sound« and this motto is in the foreground of her interpretations of both classical and contemporary works. Musicologist and music critic Wilhelm Sinkovicz characterised her 2023 recording of the six solo sonatas by the Belgian virtuoso violinist Eugène Ysaÿe as »a daring highwire act«. Following a first appearance at the Ljubljana Festival in 1994, Denisova returned in 2020 with the Gustav Mahler Ensemble. This time she will be alone on the stage, performing two selections from the series of sonatas and partitas for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, a cornerstone of the repertoire of every serious violinist. The structure of all the sonatas in the series follows that of the Baroque sonata da chiesa, with alternating slow-fast-slow-fast movements, where the first movement is a prelude and the second a fugue. The partitas, on the other hand, are formally somewhat freer and could be described as dance suites of unorthodox design. The Bach pieces will bracket two of the Ysaÿe sonatas, works which represent the development of musical techniques and forms of expression in the composer’s time: they encompass all the prominent features of 20th century music, such as extended playing techniques, freer use of dissonances and the whole-tone scale.