Prize for Diana Chausheva
The winner of the 2022 Antonín Dvořák International Radio Competition, the Bulgarian violinist Diana Chausheva, performed with the Czech Radio Orchestra under the baton of Alena Hron at the end of February: this is one of the prizes presented to Concertino Praga winners by Czech Radio.
She chose to perform the Fantaisie brillante sur des motifs de l'Opéra Faust de Gounod by Henryk Wieniawski at the concert. The publicist Rafael Brom described her performance thusly: “At the age of fifteen, she added further laurels to those already acquired from her previous competition successes. And this is no small number, even at an international level. She also played with the Radio Symphony Orchestra at that time and won the audience prize after amazing them with her rendition of Bruch’s popular Concerto for Violin and Orchestra no. 1 in G minor.
She had enough time to prepare for her February concert and as such had the opportunity to properly “get under the skin” of her Wieniawski. And she once again won over the audience with her rich and expressively attractive tone, alongside her virtuoso performance of this attractive piece. Her tone enchanted the audience from the very opening cadence before truly taking off in the second part of the Andante ma non troppo. She then confirmed her skill with beautiful double-stopping in the following section and further convinced everybody of the lyricism of her expression in the Andante. She played the technical passages with confidence and bravura.
Yet another prize for the winners of the Concertino Praga is a professional recording undertaken in a studio at Czech Radio and so it was appropriate to combine Diana’s stay with the recording session. The dramaturgy for the CD under preparation is diverse and it will contain works by Claude Debussy or Franz Schubert, for example. We are pleased that Diana has also included the Scherzo capriccioso by František Ondříček on her CD. This work was part of Diana’s winning program in the 1st round of the competition.
