From All Music Guide: Recording place:Sommer Center Chapel, Concordia College,

Mechanics Hall, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University, USA

Carnegie Hall, New York

Snape Maltings, England

Philharmonie, Berlin

F. Mann Auditorium, Tel Aviv

Avery Fisher Hall, New York

Japanese violinist Midori had a kneeling Leonard Bernstein getting up close and personal with the podium wood as a teen and was a veteran by the time she was in her late twenties. She has made a successful transition from prodigy to durable concert attraction, and a retrospective of her work was certainly a reasonable candidate for Sony's series of Essential double-disc sets. The best way to get to know Midori is still to buy one of her individual discs (her recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto in D major may be the high point, with its mix of fire and sustained motivic intelligence), but the recordings here are well known, intelligently excerpted, and competently remastered. The only issue, ...

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