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ID: RTAC003
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Piano
Concerto for piano, violin and violoncello “Triple Concerto” (L. van Beethoven)
Moon Reflected in the Second Fountain
(Hua Yanjun & Wu Zuqiang) |
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ID: SST30179
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Piano
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ID: NEOS10711
CDs: 1
Type: SACD
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Subcollection: Piano
1-6 Adrian Thompson, tenor / Czech Philharmonic Orchestra - Ronald Zollman, conductor
7 - 10 Joanna Sobkowska, piano / Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra - Vladimír Válek, conductor |
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ID: NEOS10713
CDs: 1
Type: SACD
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Collection: New Talents
Subcollection: Piano
Dan Dediu, born in Brăila/Romania, in 1967, attended the music school in Bucharest from 1981 to 1985 and then studied until 1989 at the conservatory there with Ştefan Niculescu and Dan Constantinescu. He supplemented his studies with Francis Burt, at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, and with a scholarship from the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung in Hamburg and the Alban Berg Stiftung in Vienna.
In 1991 he received first prize at the George Enescu International Composition Competition; that same year he became assistant professor for composition and form at the National University of Music in Bucharest. In 1994 he was visiting professor at Queen’s University of Belfast and attended a course in computers for music at IRCAM in Paris. In 1999 and 2001 he was artistic director of the International Week of New Music Festival in Bucharest. Since 1990 Dan Dediu has been a member of the Romanian Association of Composers, since 1992 of the national group of the ISCM. In 1998 he became professor and in 2000 chair of the composition department at the National University of Music in Bucharest.
Valentina Sandu-Dediu, piano (01-06) |
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ID: NEOS40707
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Piano
Recorded using multitracking with each individual track recorded live without editing Session dates: January 31, 2004 (drums), February 2, 2004 (bass & piano) All recordings engineered by Buzz Kemper Mixing dates: February 17 & 22, 2004 _ Mixed by Buzz Kemper and Jens Joneleit Recorded, mixed, and produced at Audio for the Arts Studio, Madison, WI, U.S.A. All compositions by Jens Joneleit _ All rights reserved - ASCAP - 2004
Special thanks to Famoudou Don Moye for inspiration & instrumentation Thanks to Buzz Kemper for his expertise, guidance and friendship helping make this solo record a reality |
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ID: SIGCD153
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Instrumental
Subcollection: Piano
“Razor Blades, Little Pills and Big Pianos” explores the emotive landscape that we call “life”. This debut recording is somewhat of a biographical expression of James Rhodes’s complex and unorthodox journey. It was Bach, Beethoven and Chopin; not Faith Hope and Charity, that offered him comfort.
“James Rhodes astonished me at his debut with his perfect playing. He has the naturalness of Nastase and the innocence of a music reader without formal education from childhood, and therefore unfettered by over-instructions. James will deservedly go far.”
Sir David Tang |
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ID: NMCD161
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Viola
Edwin Roxburgh, Lawrence Casserly, Dimitri Murrath - Edwin Roxburgh: Solos and Duos
Edwin Roxburgh’s Solos and Duos are inspired by the virtuosic skill of the performers featured on this recording. They are joined by the composer himself with Lawrence Casserley in 'At the Still Point of the Turning World...'. |
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ID: QTZ2011
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Instrumental
Subcollection: Piano
The first volume in the Gould Piano Trio's series of the complete Piano Trios by Johannes Brahms.
The Gould Trio is one of the most acclaimed young chamber ensembles to emerge from the UK in recent years and have toured many of the great international concert halls and festivals.
Brahms Piano Trios - Volume One
Of all the great composers, Brahms is probably the one we know least about. A passionately private man, he left few clues to the workings of his musical mind - unlike, say, Beethoven, there are no sketch books showing how his musical ideas evolved, just the final finished products. Anything that did not meet his exacting standards was destroyed; here is a composer who destroyed more string quartets and symphonies than he left behind. There is just a single exception, and that is the B major Piano Trio, written in 1853-4, at the height of his worship of Schumann when Brahms was twenty-one, and then revised in 1889, just before he started to withdraw into a semi-retirement from composing. By the time of the later version, the old version had a wide currency and was a popular piece. The revised version is undoubtedly finer, combining that youthful fire with the experience that the intervening years had brought him, and it is this version that is recorded here.
The opening retains its noble, sweeping idea from the original, a long singing melody, full of potential and implications, the unusual choice of key adding a warm glow. This immediately announces the scale of the piece as something equal to, say, Schubert?s final piano sonatas. After working this material to a focal point, Brahms then writes a contrasting idea. In the first version of the piece, the continuity breaks down, with a rather four-square idea, but in the revised version the continuity is such that the new theme - still retaining its own identity - grows naturally and seamlessly out of the first idea. The next section, after the themes have been stated is very different between the two versions, the first including an amazing if rather strenuous fugal passage, while the second has a density that Brahms found in old age. The piano figuration here is also far removed from the virtuoso of his youth, with clarity of texture of paramount importance. The restatement of all the material after this has a complete sense of maturity in the final version, a fusion of the two ideas and at the end, a sense of stasis, of recollection and of summing up. Listeners who know the late collections of piano pieces will recognise the fingerprints of the composer at his best here.
In all, Brahms pruned the first movement from 494 bars to 290, all in the interests of concision. The Scherzo has no such changes: mere details are changed along the way and a new coda is added, more successful and effective in preparing a slowing down of pace before the slow movement than the original, with its Mendelssohnian pizzicato version of the main theme. Listening to his Op 4 Scherzo for piano, we can sense how the youthful Brahms found such music more straight-forward than in old age, although in the overall context of this work, the Scherzo does not sound out of place. In later life, Brahms generally preferred to compose intermezzo type movements instead of scherzos - for example, only the last of the four symphonies has a Scherzo, and that of a more "symphonic" definition. The slow movement is again quite different in the two versions, the opening chorale-like idea is allowed to expand in a way that Brahms restricts in the later version and the faster section, which provided contrast, is replaced by a passionate, rather sad theme, first given to the cello. Brahms once told his pupil Jenner that a long Adagio was "the most difficult" to sustain, hence, maybe, his original solution. The mood of the revised is much more restrained and where, in the original, the audience had to be content with a brief reminiscence of the opening theme, Brahms provides a fuller restatement, with musing improvisatory figures for the piano when the strings give out their answering phrase. A harmonic shift provides tension in this closing section and, though resolved quickly, the after-effects can be felt at the start of the last movement, the only serious attempt to dislodge the key of B - major or minor - in the whole of the work. The shadowy figures eventually give way to a carefree contrasting idea, which was an addition in the revision. Clara Schumann had not been uncritical of the first version but the theme that this replaced was special to her. In Schumann's music there is an element of quotation which appealed to the young Brahms, and the theme originally at this point was a direct quotation from Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte. The symbolic significance of this quotation would not have been lost on Clara, at a time when her husband was desperately ill and it was the only part of the revision she disliked, telling Brahms that the new idea was "repellent." The restatement is varied, but structurally similar to the opening of the movement and the coda, based on the first theme, dispels any lingering doubts. Again a swathe of material was removed in this movement: almost two hundred bars are cut.
Brahms said of his new version of the piece, "I did not provide it with a wig, but merely combed and arranged its hair a little." The opportunity had come to revise the Trio as a result of a new publisher taking over his works and offering a reprint of any revisions of slight weaknesses in the early works. He must have been surprised by the extent of Brahms? touching up of this Trio and yet the miracle is how the old thematic material sits side by side with a new leaner structure, without a hint of inconsistency. Still Brahms could not make up his mind, when he finally got around to sending the publisher his revised Trio. "I must state that the old one is bad, but do not maintain that they new one is good!" That the new version speaks so directly to audiences, with none of the complexity of the older work is what has secured its place in the repertory.
The C major Trio was finished in 1882, twenty-eight years after the B major though the opening Allegro was composed in 1880. Both Summers were spent in Ischl, a spot which seems to have opened the floodgates of inspiration for Brahms (the last three movements were written in the space of a single month). The most withdrawn of his Symphonies, the Third, dates from just after this time, and its reflective mood is predicted here in this Trio. The piano's had developed enormously during the middle of the nineteenth century and in chamber works where it is partnered by strings, its power had sometimes proved quite a tour de force for the strings; Brahms on the other hand provides a most effective balance between the strings and piano with the sort of writing which was to distinguish itself again the Double Concerto (here pitted against the orchestra) written at the end of the same decade.
The rich flow and invention of the opening movement is the equal of the finest of the Classical period. one of its especial beauties is the heart of the movement where the opening theme takes on a lyrical guise, which returns in the lively coda. The slow movement is a set of five variations on a wistful folk-like melody. An important motif source is the syncopation which runs throughout the theme, deliberately holding back the inherent liquidity until the final variation.
The Scherzo is a threatening affair, with diminished sevenths running though the harmonic fabric of the movement, a harsh contrast to the open diatonicism of the central section. The Finale is, like the first movement, in a tightly constructed sonata form. Brahms is in assertive mood and his pride in the works is fully evident in every small detail.
Copyright: Mike George
Gould Piano Trio:
The Gould Piano Trio have established a reputation as one of the most stylish and versatile ensembles performing today. Highly regarded in the field of chamber music, they enjoy a career that takes them to major venues in the UK and overseas. Chosen as British Rising Stars for the 1998-9 season, the Trio has performed in such prestigious venues as New York's Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, Birmingham Symphony Hall and major halls in Paris, Cologne, Athens and Vienna.
Festival appearances have included Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Bath, Spoleto and the BBC Proms, whilst overseas travels have taken them to New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan, South America and most European countries. They regularly tour to the USA, performing in the Lincoln Center, Weil Hall and at the Frick Collection. In the UK they appear at the Wigmore Hall, Bridgewater Hall, Purcell Room, LSO St. Luke's, Queen's Hall Edinburgh, and they will be giving one of the first chamber concerts at The Sage, Gateshead as part of an Arts Council-sponsored "Around the Country" national tour. Both the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic have invited the Trio to perform James MacMillan's chamber works at their forthcoming festivals. Frequent broadcasts from these venues have made the Goulds a familiar ensemble to listeners of BBC Radio 3. The Trio have recorded CDs of trios by Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Smetana and Bax, as well as a cover disc for the BBC Music Magazine. This CD, the first in a series for Quartz, will be followed by a further volume of Brahms Trios, the premiere recordings of the trios of Robert Fuchs and the Tchaikovsky Trio. In 1999 the Trio started its own annual chamber music festival in Corbridge.
The Gould Piano Trio have been the recipients of many national and international awards; First Prize at the Charles Hennen Competition in Holland was followed by joint First Prize in the inaugural Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition in Australia. At the 1993 Premio Vittorio Gui Competition in Florence they were awarded the audience prize in addition to the overall First Prize. In the UK the Trio have won awards from the Tillett and John Tunnell Trusts. As part of their commitment to extending the piano trio repertoire, the Goulds have commissioned works and performed many contemporary pieces. They enjoy coaching young ensembles and giving workshops in schools. |
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ID: QTZ2005
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Instrumental
Subcollection: Piano
A fascinating exploration of piano works by American composers whose lives, in some way, have been touched by New York. "These pieces seemed tied inextricably with the American personality and culture", says Elizabeth Hayes of this programme, "at times warm and intimate, at others dazzling and extroverted, capturing an essence of blue-grass, jazz, hoe-downs and a cool, lyrical modernity".
Gershwin: New York Connections
I was performing Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer and some of the Gershwin Songbook as part of a recital programme. An American friend asked if I played Joplin's Solace, and so later that month I sat down with a couple of scores of Joplin's rags and found them exhilarating. I wanted to explore the American piano repertoire more fully.
I had performed Rhapsody in Blue several times with orchestras, but never properly explored the solo piano version. I was already familiar with Samuel Barber's works, but had yet to include any in my programmes.
I had the chance later that year of visiting New York for the first time, and loved it. I began to connect together a programme of American composers whose lives had touched New York. These pieces seemed tied inextricably with the American personality and culture - at times warm and intimate, at others dazzling and extroverted, capturing an essence of blue-grass, jazz, hoe-downs and a cool, lyrical modernity.
So gradually this recording took shape; I hope it shows the colour and immediacy that I found.
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn in 1898, and lived in New York for most of his life. In all of his music there is a vibrancy and colour: the bright lights of Broadway, the glamour of Hollywood. The Preludes were published in 1926. Nos. 1 and 3 are energetic, with moments of schmaltz. No.2 is essentially a blues piece - warm and tender with a simple melody over a strummed bass line.
Gershwin's success was born of the many songs from the shows he wrote with his brother Ira. He arranged several for solo piano, loving to sit and improvise at the many after-show parties. Who Cares? comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Thee I Sing, written in 1931, and has a modern feel. Fascinating Rhythm and The Man I Love came earlier, in 1924, the year of Rhapsody in Blue. I Got Rhythm was written in 1930 and is a larger-scale arrangement, with a change of key and style in the middle.
The piece that perhaps epitomises Gershwin's style more than any other is Rhapsody in Blue. Written in haste in 1924 when a mooted idea for a concert at the Aeolian Hall in New York became a reality, it is romantic, heart-on-sleeve music. A simple melodic and rhythmic idea forms the basis for the piece, which falls loosely into three sections, and he draws on many different influences in its composition: moments of ragtime, jazz and blues, as well as the work of more established composers such as Rachmaninov and Stravinsky.
Gershwin arranged the piece for solo piano in 1927, managing to keep the sense of a large-scale orchestral work while making some cuts to the original.
Aaron Copland's Four Piano Blues were written in 1949. More than any other composer he seems able to portray the sense of America's landscape and the cultural roots of its music. He was born in Brooklyn in 1900, living most of his life in New York City until his death in 1990.
Though he was known more widely for his large-scale orchestral works, Copland writes with intimacy and a very personal voice in these short pieces. Each has a descriptive performance direction: 1. Freely poetic; 2. Soft and languid; 3. Muted and sensuous; 4. With bounce.
Leonard Bernstein's Anniversaries are again intimate portraits, snap-shots of people in his life. He wrote several sets - these four are from 1948.
1. Dedicated to his wife, Felicia Montealegre - it shows sadness, beauty, a complex character, implicit tenderness. 2. For Johnny Mehegan, is sexy and dangerous - a foretaste perhaps of the music of West Side Story. Mehegan was a successful jazz pianist and close friend of Bernstein.
3. Written for the composer David Diamond - there is a seriousness here, but also a sensitivity. 4. For Helen Coates - a whirlwind of a piece, describing his assistant - a woman central to his career. It shows a brittle, pointed character, buzzing with energy and with a fiery temper.
Leonard Bernstein became connected with New York through his work with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, from 1958, and was a friend and colleague of Copland, dying there the same year, 1990.
Samuel Barber wrote the four Excursions from 1942 to 1944, describing them as "excursions in small classical forms into regional American idioms...Their regional characteristics, as well as their sources in folk material and their scoring, reminiscent of local instruments, are easily recognised." Though sometimes labelled as "neo-Romantic", Barber's writing refuses to be pigeon-holed into one particular style, and these pieces show that diversity well.
The first is the only piece to show sophistication and dryness in its boogie-woogie bass line and rhythmic patterning. More dissonant than the others, it may reflect the city of New York where he lived for some years, dying there in 1981. No.2 has a feel of the deep south, a plaintive blues melody. The third is opulent and lush, with a vaguely Latin-American style. The cross-rhythms are complex, though the overall effect is very free and improvisatory. Finally there is a hoe-down; the fourth piece is exuberant and folksy, reminiscent of harmonica and fiddle-playing.
Scott Joplin was born in Texas in 1868, and spent the life of an itinerant ragtime pianist until moving to New York in 1911. He worked in the bars and jazz clubs of St. Louis and Chicago for many years, but was later able to gain an income from the publication of his rags - notably his first success, Maple Leaf Rag - named after the Maple Leaf Club of Sedalia, where he played for some time. The Entertainer has become perhaps his most famous composition - both this and Maple Leaf Rag encapsulate the elegance, subtlety and wit of Joplin's work. Magnetic Rag is an example of the later rags, more experimental in its harmonies, and with one of its sections in a minor key. It has the feel of an accompaniment to a silent movie, with a broader emotional scope than usual. Solace, subtitled A Mexican Serenade, is a much more personal statement, with a gentle melancholy and beautiful lyricism
Programme Notes by Elizabeth Hayes |
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