Niels Otto Raasted: Sonater for soloviolin

His is a new name to me, and what a pleasant discovery it is! He's a Danish composer who lived from 1888 to 1966. One of his main teachers was Max Reger, whose influence, along with JS Bach and Carl Nielsen, can be keenly heard here. He uses chromatic harmony/melodies, but it's a little less forbidding than Reger's, and he uses Baroque forms, such as preludes, fugues, chaconnes, and passacaglias. This music must be quite challenging to play with its frequent use of counterpoint and multi-stops, but Hansen deals with them effortlessly. His robust yet warm tone is captured in astonishingly vivid sound with plenty of ambiance, although it tends to decay quickly at the end of movements. If you enjoy solo violin and the neo-Baroque genre, then I can highly recommend this disc.