Eugène Ysaye, Thomas Zehetmair, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, Heinz Holliger

Heinz Holliger's Violin Concerto, subtitled Hommage à Louis Soutter, is a four-movement portrait of the Swiss painter Louis Soutter. Soutter began his artistic life as a violinist and studied with Eugène Ysaÿe. Holliger wrote the solo part for Thomas Zehetmair, who plays it here with the composer conducting. Zehetmair also opens the disc with Ysaÿe's Third Sonata for solo violin. It is quoted at the start of the concerto, so the listener hears one of the work's sources before the work itself.

The concerto began as a commission for the 75th anniversary of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the orchestra in which Soutter had once played. Holliger wrote the first three movements between 1993 and 1995 and added the long Epilog years later, completing the four-movement version in 2002. The concerto was recorded in December 2002 at the Konzerthaus Freiburg with the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, in a co-production with Südwestrundfunk. The Ysaÿe sonata was taped in September 2002 at the Propstei St. Gerold. Manfred Eicher produced.

Soutter spent his last two decades in an asylum, and his pictures carry a militant pacifism. Holliger has said that some of his ways of painting could be turned into sound almost directly, and the score "translates" the agitated brushstrokes into pitches. The first three movements, Deuil, Obsession and Ombres, grow more and more glaring, with a prominent cimbalom and instruments pushed into high registers. Ombres, the longest of them, turns into a runaway of shrieking piccolos and driving percussion before it falls into darkness. The Epilog takes its title, Avant le massacre, from a picture Soutter painted on 1 September 1939, the first day of the Second World War. Slow and almost static, it leaves the soloist circling small fragments until the violin fades out.

The disc was an Editor's Choice in Gramophone and entered the Bestenliste of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik in 2004. In The Guardian, Andrew Clements wrote that "the music is often breathless and always compelling", and found the recording "fabulously detailed and impassioned". For Martin Cotton in BBC Music Magazine it was "disturbing music, but the real thing."

CD edition, ECM New Series 1890, first released in June 2004. The booklet has a note by Holliger, essays in German and French, and reproductions of Soutter's paintings, one of which is on the cover.