Marieke Schneemann - Violin Caprices Transcribed for Flute [CD]

Marieke Schneemann is by no means the first to play Paganini's finger-breaking Caprices on the flute, with all the necessary transpositions that requires, not to mention a virtuosity at least matching that required to play them on the violin, but she is the first to do so on a 'period' flute: a wooden conical ring-keyed flute by Louis Lot, Paris, 1860, As Schneeman remarks in her booklet introduction, the first flute-arrangement of the Caprices was made over a century ago by Jules Herman; she has made her own, striving to respect both the beauty and the limitations of the instrument. "Thus, in arranging the Caprices, I have stayed true to the violin version as much as possible, and have only sporadically drawn my inspiration from the arrangement by Jules Herman." Schneemann has been first and foremost a musician in the period instrument movement working within the flourishing historically informed music culture of the Netherlands, where she has collaborated with the Netherlands Bach Ensemble (in Bach's Musical Offering, available on Brilliant Classics) and a historically-informed disc of Ravel's chamber music. She has also built multimedia projects as both visual artist and musician.