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Thank you Rachel Barton Pine

April 27, 2013 at 11:26 PM

Just a quick note to express my thanks to Rachel Barton Pine for recording and distributing her renditions of the Wolfahrt Etudes. As a Suzuki dad who has been learning the violin for the last year along with my daughter, I have really benefited from this course of study and especially the recordings in a very short period of time. I wish that I had found them much sooner.

Ms Pine's accompaniment is a wonderful supplement to the sheet music. It has been a great inspiration and has helped me to gain a greater sense of the complexities of tone and color that can be brought forward in these etudes and in my playing more generally.

I consider myself an absolute beginner but every aspect of my playing has improved since I have started working regularly on them. I am actually wanting to turn on a metronome for the first time since starting the violin.

(A quick note to readers: These are on a dvd rather than a cd. To untether from from my PC, I opened it up on my computer, copied to my desktop and then imported into itunes so that I can use it from my iPhone or iPad on my music stand.)

I also just like listening to them when I go out for a jog or while driving in the car. :)

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If you have not seen it, here also is the interview where Rachel talks about Franz Wohlfahrt. :)
Fantastic interview Laurie, thanks for sharing it. :)

Regarding Wolfahrt, he seems to have been well regarded as a composer. Google books unearthed a well reviewed set of compositions in the Strad ("Bunte Reihe for two violins and a piano - these are 5 pieces easy and melodius and well worthy of attention by amateurs") and "Romanze" by Franz Wolfahrt is a selection in an ad for Julius Eichberg's "Modern Violin Music". There also appears to have been a chemist of the same name living around the same time in Germany.

Based on the history I found about his father, Heinrich, I can't help but wonder how many of these etudes were things that he learned as a boy.