On the occasion of the 2025 Kreisler anniversary year, the exceptional violinist Benjamin Schmid posed the question: What happens for the violin in Vienna roughly 100 years after Fritz Kreisler? The result is this phenomenal recording with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna under Lorenz Aichner, featuring orchestrated works by Kreisler and the world premiere recording of the “Concerto for Beni for Solo Violin and String Orchestra” (2023) by Georg Breinschmid, born in Vienna in 1973.

To quote the dedicatee, it is a “magnificent violin concerto that, from my perspective, shares much with the musical understanding of Fritz Kreisler: music with unadulterated joy of playing, which devotes itself immediately and as artfully as possible to the parameters of melody, harmonic experience, and dance-like (or groovy) rhythm. There is always a close relationship to instrumental virtuosity and sonority – some-thing very strongly pronounced in both composers. The album includes Fritz Kreisler’s Preludium and Allegro “in the Style of Pugnani” and the “Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta” in arrangements for (string) orchestra. Kreisler’s “Concerto in One Movement”, based on the first movement of Paganini’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 6, is presented here in an arrangement for wind orchestra, recorded with the Salzburg Wind Philharmonic under Hansjörg Angerer.