VIOLIN TALES OR RHAPSODY IN RED

One could describe the violinist from Munich, Hannes Beckmann, as a musical counterpart of Emil Nolde. Just as that expressionist painter acquired a more gorgeous and brighter style of colouring, so also Beckmann: “Through his openness towards new influences, particularly Brazilian and Afro-Cuban, but also South East European and classical music, he decidedly enriched the post-Hot Club and Stephane Grappelli style to find a language of his own, in which the rhythmic intensity of the American school and the finely chiselled elegance of the gipsy tradition or the long rhapsodic breath of a Ray Nance are equally present…” - so says the RoRoRo Jazz Lexicon.

Tales told and retold, Violin Tales: Beckmann relates his stories with sensitivity and intuition: his arrangements are stringent. The violin especially has always signified the bright scarlet of feeling, so that the danger of sentimentality lurks at every twist. Beckmann, on the lookout for emotional depth, is immune to this danger, with his masterful understanding of how to make use of shrewd provocation and bizarre alienation effects.