Pianist Andrew Armstrong has an international career, having performed items from his large repertory of 35 concertos at all the major U.S. concert halls and prestigious venues across Europe. He is a noted chamber player, often performing and recording with violinist James Ehnes. Armstrong was born on February 18, 1974, in New Canaan, Connecticut, and has continued to perform often in cities along the Connecticut coast. He began piano lessons at age seven, at first only because he was jealous of his older sister, Jane, who had been offered them. He took to the instrument, and his father, a pianist, noticed how he began to carefully shape the music he played. In his teens, Armstrong was sent to the Hoff-Berthelson School in Scarsdale, New York, for studies with Miyoko Nakaya. He began to win prizes, 25 of them in all, and as a freshman at Columbia University (he paid his tuition largely with prize money), he entered the Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Earning plaudits from Cliburn himself, Armstrong won a Jury Discretionary Award. After that, though, the prizes dried up, and a first-round washout at the next Cliburn Competition caused Armstrong to think he was prioritizing prize-winning over musicality. He dropped out of Columbia, left his teacher, and began to study concertos on his own, taking engagements with orchestras large and small that wanted to have him.

The duo of old friends James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong has established itself as one of the most exciting of our times. Their albums of violin sonatas by Franck & Strauss, and Debussy, Elgar & Respighi have been praised by critics worldwide. For this new album they turn to Beethoven and two A major sonatas with very different moods. The 9th, ‘Kreutzer’ sonata, is a huge work, heroic and turbulent in character – a kind of concerto for violin and piano. It is middle period Beethoven at its most dramatic. By contrast, the 6th sonata is a serene, introspective work of great beauty which has tended to be overlooked by its more outward-looking siblings. The intimacy of this sonata – especially the slow movement - is all the more surprising as the original finale was removed by the composer, to become the finale of the ‘Kreutzer’. Beethoven wrote the gentle variations to conclude the 6th sonata.

The second volume of the Beethoven 'Violin Sonata' cycle, from James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong, follows the critically acclaimed release of 'Sonatas Nos. 6& 9, 'Kreutzer'. This album contains the three early 'Op. 12, Sonatas' (which Beethoven dedicated to his teacher Antonio Salieri) and ends with the early 'Variations on a Theme From Mozart's Marriage of Figaro'.