Despite their young age, Zala Kravos and her younger brother Val are outstanding pianists performing all over the world since many years. They regularly impress professionals and the audience by their talent and musical maturity. They are soloists but often play together the repertoire for piano duo and their fusional relationship is particularly striking. In 2019, they obtained a diploma in chamber music as a piano duo at the Conservatory of the City of Luxembourg. The present release is their first on Ars Produktion. The album with music for piano duo, including a composition written by a contemporary French composer especially for them.

Ayako Ito: “Nowadays, in concert halls, we generally see a single type of piano that normally has 88 keys and is normally black. Things were quite different in the Vienna of the 19th century: the piano had fewer keys, was decorated with wooden inlay and had no steel subframe. All this made them sound quite different. Conrad Graf was one of the finest builders of pianofortes in Vienna in the period from 1820-40. And Franz Schubert was living in the same city.We can revive a rich, warm, singing, powerful and even orchestral sound on Graf's pianofortes. His pianos feature the Viennese action or “Prellzungenmechanik”, with their hammers built up from many layers of leather. These hammers allow the performer to impart subtle nuances and dynamic contrasts. Of course, the pianos are straight-strung. The player can alter the tonal color using four pedals, with one of the pedals specific to the pianoforte being the moderator. When the moderator pedal is depressed, a strip of cashmere slips between the hammers and the strings. Christopher Clarke (1947) built the instrument used for this recording in 2000, as a facsimile of Conrad Graf's pianoforte no. 995. Clarke's pianoforte always inspires me. I find it a miraculous instrument. The utter precision of the mechanism lets us explore the finest gradations and introduce the most subtle nuances – singing, speaking or whispering. It is a mechanism that demands a high technical mastery from the player.”

Review

Ayako Ito approaches the masterpiece D960 with romantic fervour, trusting the less powerful, more refined, tone of the fortepiano will provide authentic period sound compensation. Her opening theme isn’t as soft as pp, but smoother and more swinging than the Molto moderato marking suggests. The deep bass disturbance at the end of its first full statement (tr. 1, 0:24) is more threatening than the pp marking. The clarity of Ito’s running quavers in the ‘tenor’ part enhances the tense atmosphere, yet the third part of the first theme (0:58), more pleading, moves through quiet insistence. The second theme (2:06), is in the tenor part against the ‘soprano’ descant, with Ito’s sensitive balance the latter’s creaminess like a loving companion. The dancing three-quaver groups in triplets which eventually result skip buoyantly. The phrase of resolution terminating these (4:04) deserves more breadth, but the extraordinary exposition ‘first time’ codetta (4:55), like hobgoblins arriving, Ito makes boldly gawky.

In the development (10:19) Ito prefers cool examination rather than shock, its ff climax of the dancing triplets underplayed (11:27). But she builds the tension and dynamic well to the fruition of the third theme (12:18), the most tender and memorable. Ito makes the second theme recap (16:08) more delicate and sensitive. Her coda (19:22) is tranquil yet flowing.

The opening of the slow movement juxtaposes a left-hand four note rising figure and melancholic right-hand melody. Ito makes the first and final notes of the left-hand figure very clear as bell peals three octaves apart. In this C sharp minor funeral Ito is sorrowful yet smoothly dignified, her equipoise between the hands arguably overmuch easing the pain of bereavement. The central section in A major (tr. 2, 2:59) remembers the loved one and clarifies a relationship, its theme beginning in rich ‘baritone’ register, the soprano repeat (3:26) adding varied semiquaver runs. From Ito it feels like both parties confirm shared sadness. At the return to the opening (5:36) the left-hand has an additional four-note motif, three semiquavers and a quaver, for me like funeral carriage wheels biting into the road. Ito makes it a clear, inescapable presence. The decrescendo after the melody’s climax finds the left-hand unheeding the pathos of the melody briefly in C major (6:30); yet after the next melodic climax comes a blessing, the coda (7:55) easing calmly into C sharp major.

Ito’s finale’s rondo theme begins a bit stiff in marking out the rhythm; her second strain (tr. 4, 0:21) is catchier and first episode (1:24) blends calm tone with confident movement, the relationship between melody and accompaniment grippingly maintained, until a sudden silence and ff shock (2:36) of catastrophe, especially when the melodic outburst goes into descant register.

Best of D946, Three piano pieces, is for me the first. It’s in E flat minor with urgent first strain to its right-hand cyclical theme. The second (tr. 5, 0:15) adds more rhythm, then a melody picked out from the first notes of the three-quaver groupings (0:19). The return of the first strain is in E flat major (0:50), the touch more rhythm a vehicle for Ito screaming a scrunched appoggiatura at the fz climax. The central section second theme (2:54) is in B major, festooned with turns and phrase-ending arpeggios, Ito revealing it as leisurely and affectionate. Its second strain (4:13) adds glissando-like up-and-down [32nd notes], the return of the first more luxurious in chording and close more rhetorical. To this vibrant, varied piece Ito brings considerable gusto.

--MusicWeb International (Michael Greenhalgh)

Schubert composed his Sonata No. 4 in A minor (D. 537), a work of unabashed Romanticism, in 1817. Whilst the outer movements are highly dramatic in character, the central slow movement features a long and enchanting melody of an almost fragile delicacy. He returned to this melody eleven years later in 1828, using it as the theme of the last movement of the Sonata No. 19 in A major D. 959, his penultimate sonata. This Allegretto is perhaps the most "Schubertian" of all: it is generous, graceful, full of hope despite a weighty melancholy, and always in motion. Schubert’s return to the melody that he had composed when he was twenty years old attests his particular love for it; it was his personal hymn, his secret melody.

Christopher Glynn continues his Schubert in English series by joining baritone Roderick Williams and soprano Rowan Pierce for songs of loneliness and companionship, nature and the seasons, faith and doubt, wandering and homecoming, caution and consolation - all in new English versions by Jeremy Sams.

Pianist, composer, and producer Sergei Kvitko’s new album, Schubert by Candlelight - Live in Madrid is a stunning collection of Schubert’s piano works. The album features thirteen piano works that showcase the beauty and depth of Schubert’s music, as well as the artistry and versatility of Kvitko, who is not only an award-winning, critically acclaimed pianist, but also a composer, arranger, producer and sound engineer. The album was recorded at Hinves Pianos, Madrid, Spain on April 7, 2022. (Reference)

With his song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin op. 25, published in Vienna in August 1824, Franz Schubert created one of the first song cycles in music history. It is a real cycle, not just a loose collection, because all the poems united in it hang firmly on a narrative thread: a narrated story, presented in 20 individual songs. It is clear that the most appropriate instrument for Die Schöne Müllerin is not the modern concert grand piano, but rather the fortepiano of Schubert's time, with its delicate, transparent sound and enormous richness of color. This makes for a completely different listening experience. But the arrangement that Tom Randle wrote for the ALINDE Quartet in 2022 can also open one's ears in a completely new way.

SOMM RECORDINGS is delighted to pay tribute to the British tenor Ian Partridge on his 85th birthday on June 12 with Stimme der Liebe (The Voice of Love), a collection of iconic songs by Schubert, on which he is joined by his pianist-sister Jennifer Partridge and pianist Ernest Lush. The great German lyric baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau hailed Partridge’s Schubert interpretations as “a pure joy”, an accolade that these 20 performances of Lieder, taken from BBC Radio broadcasts between 1968 and 1972 – and available now for the first time on disc – readily illustrate. They reveal Partridge’s unique, insightful affinity with the complexity and nuance of Schubert’s response to matters of the heart, a quality Fischer Dieskau described – in a facsimile letter to the singer included in the booklet – as his “respect and love for the music”. Among familiar works such as ‘Im Frühling’, ‘Das Fischermädchen’ and ‘An den Mond’, are relative rarities such as ‘Vor meiner Wiege’, which Partridge describes in his booklet interview with Jon Tolansky exploring his “life-long love affair” with Schubert’s Lieder, as one of the composer’s “most inspired creations”.

With a repertoire ranging from Monteverdi and Elizabethan lute songs to Schoenberg and Britten, Ian Partridge is one of the most acclaimed lyric tenors of his generation. He is especially known for his success with songs and Lieder and regarded as one of the great modern Schubert interpreters. His hugely successful partnership with his pianist-sister, Jennifer, saw the duo giving more than 430 recitals and making numerous recordings over their 52-year-long partnership. The booklet also includes informative notes, texts and translations by Richard Stokes, Professor of Lieder at London’s Royal Academy of Music, and author of The Book of Lieder (Faber, 2005). Restoration of the original recordings has been undertaken by audio expert and long-time SOMM collaborator, Lani Spahr.