Won’t nearly an hour and three quarters of music for violin and piano by the same composer be too monotonous? No it won’t, because it is Dvořák... Dvořák never repeated himself; in every work, he created a different musical world. It would be hard to find another composer capable of such diversity within a single musical genre.

After the earliest of the pieces, the Romance, he sent his publisher Simrock the Mazurek, which he dedicated to the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate. The almost meditative Nocturne first appeared in a string quartet and then a quintet before being heard for the first time as an independent piece in arrangements including one for violin and piano. The Violin Sonata in F major, a chamber music pendant to Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, clearly took inspiration from Brahms’s First Violin Sonata. And there is more: the virtuosic Capriccio, the haunting Romantic Pieces, the Slavonic Dance no.2 presented here uniquely in the composer’s own arrangement, the delightful Humoresque arranged by Fritz Kreisler... and a work bearing the opus number 100, which Dvořák deliberately reserved for his Sonatina dedicated to two of his children; though simple, it is no less individual than any of the composer’s other mature opuses.

To sum it all up, this is a unique collection of Dvořák’s complete works for violin and piano recorded by the virtuoso Jiří Vodička, concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic, sensitively accompanied by David Mareček at the piano. The recording is enhanced by the beautiful acoustics of the Rudolfinum’s Dvořák Hall in Prague.