Luogo e data di registrazione		-
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Supervision		-
	Edizione LP		TELEFUNKEN - 6.42075 AP - (1 LP - durata 53' 14") - (p) 1978 - Analogico
	Originale LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		-
	Note		-

The musical centre of Brussels was the starting and focal point in the career of the duet Evelyne Brancart / atar Arad. The two young musicians (meanwhile a married couple) now have their domicilie in London. Atar Arad comes from Israel, having been born 1945 in Tel Aviv. It was there that he received his first musical training, which he continued in 1968 at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth in Brussels. He wa admitted as a violinist to this well-known school for young virtuosos, but three years later decided in favour of the viola, a move which determined the course of his unusual career. In 1972 just one year after switching instruments, he received the City of London prize as laureate of the international Carl Flesch Competition for violin and viola. He achieved his major artistic break-through in the same year when the international Geneva Music Competition unanimously awarded him the first prize. the first time in the history of the competition that is had ever been given for viola playing. This success triggered a series of numerous invitations to concerts and productions with radio stations, such as South West Germany Radio, Radio de la Suisse Romande, Italian Radio (RAI), the Belgian (RTB) and British (BBC) radio systems. Atar Arad was also increasingly invited to appear in festivals. Gramophone recordings (such as Telefunken No. 6.42007 with viola concertos by Paganini, F.A. Hoffmeister and Carl Stamitz, and Telefunken No. 6.42076,  with Sonata op. 11, No. 5 by Paul Hindemith) also provided testimony of the interpretative art of this seccessful musician. The musical partner in the Hindemith sonata mentioned above ist the Brussels-born pianist Evelyn Brancart. She too studied at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth of Belgium. At the age of 16 she won first prize at a Beethoven piano competition organised by the Brussels television network; in 1975 she was a finaist at the Brussels piano competition. Evelyne Brancart made a name for herself through piano recitals in  Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, Russia and, of course, in Belgium as a piano interpreter, mainly with works of the virtuoso repertoire. She was thus able to devote herself in collaboration with atar Arad to an increasing extent to viola and piano literature, for instance the tonally intimate fairy pictures by Robert Schumann, or the more virtuoso arranged Sonata No. 36 of the Belgian Henri Vieuxtemps. Atar Arad rounds off here alone the present sound musicians portrait with three pieces for viola: an elegy by Igor Stravinsky (in memory of Alphonse Onnou, the founder and member of the Pro Arte Quartet), a Fantasia cromatica by Johann Sebastian Bach in the arrangement by Zoltán Kodály, and finally an extremely bravura-style capriccio, published in conjunction with the "Six Morceaux pour Violon seul" op. 55, by the Belgian violin maestro Henri Vieuxtemps. Gerhard Wienke (English translation by Frederick A. Bishop)