Composer Robert Szymanek writes about LSO Soundhub and how being on the scheme has benefited him.

LSO Soundhub has been one of the most important parts of my musical world over the last few years. When I finished my PhD in Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in 2012, I was unsure as to how I was going to find the resources I needed to compose, rehearse and record my music out in the real world.

By the time he composed his Violin Concerto in 1945 Eric Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) had already made a name for himself as one of the most accomplished and versatile composers of his generation. He first came to prominence as an astonishingly talented child-prodigy in Vienna, and by the age of 20 he was already a well-established composer with a number of major works to his name.

Dubbed the 'queen of the downloads', Janine Jansen is next up in the LSO International Violin Festival performing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. We find out more about her and her violin, in this blog.

'I think what Beethoven as a piano player would love about the fiddle, and that shows throughout the string quartets, is a certain ability of singing that only the greatest piano players achieve, and that only with a lot of fantasy and make-believe. What he’s looking for in the concerto is an even more singing quality and a tenderness throughout the piece that is not a trademark of all of his pieces. You’d be surprised to see that most of my part is marked piano, and even pianissimo. For a violin concerto you would assume it would say: come on, go on stage and tell them how big and beautiful you are. So with the first big concerto of the literature, he’s going a very specific way which is not the way, let’s say, of Brahms and Tchaikovsky and many others. He is a very human soul in this piece.'