The Janoska Ensemble – Live in Bratislava

With their “Janoska style” the four members of the Janoska Ensemble have developed a breathtakingly virtuosic and profoundly personal vision of music, which they interpret in a thoroughly modern way. Among unifying factors are their family ties and an inexhaustible inventiveness that allows them to explore a wide range of works from popular classics to compositions that they have written themselves and, finally, idiosyncratic arrangements of jazz, pop and world music. For Live in Bratislava the four Janoskas have chosen to present a picture of Vienna as a cultural melting pot, lacing it with irony and wit, and evincing a very real delight in music-making that time and again takes them beyond the confines of the Austrian capital. Virtuoso classics by Franz Waxman, Niccolò Paganini and Pablo de Sarasate are heard alongside a Viennese work by Fritz Kreisler and operetta themes by Johann Strauss combined with the strains of a csárdás and music from the Balkans, to say nothing of a number of flights of fancy across the Atlantic to the world of the tango and rumba and of jazz improvisations.