From the Archives: Katrin Scholz

Raiding my archives of recordings, it is tempting to imagine that those who become really famous are always la crème de la crème, but it's not always so. Country of birth, financial supporters, powerful agents, international recording contracts, racial or nationalist supporter groups and critics, confidence in performing in public ... all can count for even more than sheer top talent at playing the violin. I have a large number of recordings featuring Vilde Frang, Katrin Scholz, Antje Weithaas, Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Adolf Busch, Gerhardt Taschner, Erich Röhn, Georg Kulenkampff, and many, many others that are hardly household names. Then there are good violinists who achieve media fame through eccentricities – such as Gilles Apap, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Nigel Kennedy, Nemanja Radulovic. And meteorites such as Ginette Neveu and Josef Hassid.

Katrin Scholz was born in Berlin in 1969 (the same year as the youngest of my three children, as it happens). Her Berlin Classics recordings mainly date from the period 1997-2006 when she would have been in her late twenties and early thirties. She recorded for the German company, Berlin Classics. One of the company's most welcome features is listing the composers for the cadenzas used; few companies do this, and it's vaguely annoying when they do not. In the Beethoven concerto, Scholz plays the cadenza by Joachim (with Kreisler's in the third movement). In Mozart's 4^th and 5^th violin concertos, she also uses Joachim's cadenzas. For the Beethoven concerto first movement, I prefer Kreisler's to all the other many contenders.

Scholz appears to have remained Berlin-based for much of her career, and I have five CDs from Berlin Classics, many of them with the Kammerorchester Berlin. They include superb, classical recordings of the Beethoven violin concerto, plus three Mozart concertos, and the Brahms concerto. She also recorded the Sibelius concerto, Saint-Saëns' third concerto, and Martinu's second (why bother?) In addition there is a Spanish Dance CD where she plays miscellaneous pieces by de Falla, Sarasate, Ravel, et al. Katrin Scholz playing “Spanish” is an unexpected success; pigeon-holing her as a superb player of the German classics, one does not expect her to play the 21 tracks of Spanish dances as to the manor born. But she does, with a real sense of style and rhythm. Bravo, Katrin. Her five CDs will never go in my throw-out bin.