Susan Collins - Hart: Complete Music for Violin & Piano, Vol. 1 (2019)

The composer and conductor Fritz Hart (1874–1949) led a peripatetic life: London-born, he moved to Australia to tour travelling productions of musicals there and in New Zealand. He soon became a formative figure in Australian musical life as teacher and conductor, but in 1936 left to become the first professor of music at the University of Hawai’i and permanent conductor of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. Hart‘s three violin sonatas – poised but passionate – reveal a musical language influenced by Debussyan Impressionism but also coloured by his own Celtic roots. Here they receive their first recordings from two of Australia’s most highly regarded musicians, the violinist Susan Collins, in her first appearance on Toccata Classics, and Stephanie McCallum, a Toccata regular.