With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Fazil Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than twenty-five years, in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organized classical music world. Concerts with this artist are something different. They are more direct, more open, more exciting; in short, they go straight to the heart. On the album now being released by Solo Musica together with the casalQuartett “Ballads & Quintets” there are two works by Fazil Say in addition to the Piano Quintet in E flat major op. 44 by Schumann. The casalQuartett, which has won numerous awards, has developed itself a unique sound and style that sheds new light on the heyday of the string quartet. The 3 Ballads op. 12 for Piano Quintet were originally solo piano ballads, which were rearranged especially for this publication for piano quintet. The piano quintet "The Moving Mansion" breathes new life into stories of the past. The background is a spectacular tale about the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Schumann - Davidsbundler Against Philistines / Florian Uhlig
Haenssler Classic
CD
$6.99$13.99Save 50%Mar 10, 2015
With vol. 8, pianist Florian Uhlig reaches the midway point of his widely acclaimed, much admired first truly integral Schumann recording project. - This new CD deals with the dual nature of the composer and writer, finding it's finest expression in the David's bündlertänze (1st version, op. 6). - The typical romantic play of rubrics, musical ciphers and pseudonyms can also be found in the Carnival, op. 9. - Additionally, Mr. Uhlig has collected some related miniatures that Schumann either rejected or were never included in subsequent printed editions, at least three being world premiere recordings.
Founded in 1985, the Kammerata Luxembourg has established itself at the centre of the country’s musical life with new commissions, concert series and recordings, supported by its ministry of culture. One recent enterprising series was named ‘The European Union Enlarges’, focusing on the chamber music of future EU states, and others such as this album have constructed enlightening juxtapositions of modern and Romantic-era repertoire. Few composers from the 19th century have exercised so potent an influence upon composers of our time as Robert Schumann. His abrupt changes of mood and intense, passionate commitment to individual expressive states have seized the imagination of many composers as well as listeners. Not the least of them is Schumann’s fellow German AribertReimann, In arranging the Fantasiestücke Op.73, Reimann altered not a note of the clarinet part while arranging the piano accompaniment for the unusual combination of flute, a harp and two violas, which enables him to explore both the sombre timbres and the more ethereal hues of the score. The Op.107 songs are united by both a theme of unrequited love and a mood of wistful other-worldliness, which Reimann accentuates with an often-Expressionist recasting of the piano part for string quartet. The other original work here is the collection of canonic pieces originally written for a pedal piano and arranged by Schumann’s contemporary Theodor Kirchner. Meanwhile, the two contemporary responses to Schumann are undertaken in a spirit of the most sincere love and homage. Kurtág’s instrumentation for clarinet, viola and piano refers back to the Op.132 Märchenerzählungen – fairy tales – and he peppers his score with both literary allusions and references back to the object of his homage. Jörg Widmann likewise evokes Schumann’s Op.23 Nachtstücke in his own trio for clarinet, cello and piano. Anyone fearful of new music need not hesitate: Widmann insinuates himself into a world of Romantic melancholy with uncanny skill.
Claudio Bohórquez and Péter Nagy are releasing a new album, dedicated to that composer par excellence Robert Schumann, and his works for chamber duo Performing a programme comprising works from the clarinet, oboe, viola and vocal repertoires, the two renowned soloists throw renewed light on some unknown facets of a famous composer. The key focus of the album is a central work in the field of Lieder Schumann's Dichterliebe Bohórquez and Nagy lure their listeners on a journey through the innermost core of Romantic emotions Bohórquez has a highly interesting technique, sure to fascinate not just connoisseurs of Dichterliebe of interpreting these songs without words with such a fine level of tonal nuance and such songful bowing that they never seem like wordless songs. There are further chamber works by Schumann to enjoy, the majority not actually written for the combination of cello and piano his Three Fantasy Pieces op 73 were originally composed for clarinet or violin and piano Schumann actually wrote the Three Romances op 94 for oboe, the Fairytale Pictures op 113 for viola and piano The experienced chamber music duo simply claim as their own these pieces which might seem alien to their combination of instruments "This gave me the opportunity to immerse myself in a whole range of other instruments and to find a solution for the cello," explains Bohórquez. Only the Five Pieces in Folk Style op 102 were originally scored for the cello. Altogether the resulting album, by combining these five works, does not standardize them into part of the cello piano repertoire On the contrary in each of the works, Bohórquez and Nagy immerse themselves in a thoroughly new and individual tonal landscape, and in Schumann's Dichterliebe they even succeed in conjuring up the lyrics of Heinrich Heine.
Homelands is a powerful album of classical art song about exile. Featuring Ian Bostridge, Jennifer France, James Atkinson, Wonsick Oh, and pianist Aron Goldin, who curated the project. The songs (include many favorites by Tchaikovsky and Faure) are on the theme of exile and yearning for home. A performance of Homelands at the Royal Academy of Music in London on World Refugee Day in June 2022, with Olivier Award, Bafta and Tony Award winning actor Sir Simon Russell Beal reading poems by Auden, Brecht and Carol Ann Duffy with ancient Hebrew and Chinese poetry raised over £200,000 for the 30 Birds Foundation, a charity that enabled 500 Afghan school girls to escape the Taliban and fly from Kabul to Canada.
Following a highly personal and splendidly reviewed Brahms recording, Fabian Müller follows up with Passionato, an album centering not on a single composer, but on a "central masterwork of Western piano music": Beethoven's "Appassionata". Radiating from this hub, Müller weaves a programme that shows why he is regarded as one of Germany's most promising young pianists. It stands to reason that he is not the first pianist to apply his energies to this great work laid out on the grand scale, and Fabian Müller is well aware of this. "Each generation is entitled to rediscover these pieces for itself. Apart from that, it is simply not possible to play a piece the same way twice. So even if I know my favourite performances back to front, mine will still be the 'Appassionata' of Fabian Müller." This is the starting-point of his new album, geographically as well as musically. Having grown up between the Beethovenhaus and Schumannhaus in Bonn, he sees "much more of the Rhinelander than the Viennese" in Beethoven, flanking the Appassionata with Schumann's G minor Sonata - a work of extremes. When Schumann requires the artist to play "as fast as possible" in the first movement, then "even faster" in the coda, Müller has his own personal answer: "It is more a feeling that is too strong to be expressed in a 'normal' manner. Drop everything and play for your life. That is the key. A feeling that something is flooding out of you."
Masur's first important conducting job was with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom he worked from 1955 to 1958 and again from 1967 to 1972. He also worked with the Komische Oper of East Berlin. From 1970 to 1996 he was teh Kapellmeister of the famous Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. In 1991, Masur became music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. From 2002 to 2008, Masur was music director of the Orchestre National de France. On his 80th birthday, Masur conducted musicians from both these orchestras at a Proms concert in London, conducting music by Tchaikovsky and Bruckner. The beginnings of the orchestra go back to 1743, when a society called the Grosses Concert began performing in private homes. The orchestra gave its first concert in the Gewandhaus in 1781. It is the oldest orchestra in Germany, apart for private orchestras. In 1835, the great composer Felix Mendelssohn became the orchestra's main conductor. He was called the Gewandhauskapellmeister. He kept this position, apart from one year, until his death in 1847. In 1885, the orchestra moved into a new hall which was given the same name. The present Gewandhaus is the third building with the name. It was opened in 1981.
Romanian classical pianist Clara Haskil (1895-1960) was particularly well known for her brilliant interpretations of classical and early romantic repertoire, especially that of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann. Haskil didn’t gain much acclaim until the late 1940s because of a series of physical ailments mixed with crippling stage fright. The songs on this release are all live recordings from Haskil’s concerts, taken between 1947 and 1956, during the peak of her career.
Schumann: Piano Works & Chamber Music Vol 11 / Eric Le Sage
Alpha
CD
$29.99Jan 11, 2011
Last disc of the complete works for piano and piano and chamber music, this recording comes as the peak of a series which confirmed Eric Lesage as THE specialist of the Schumann repertoire. The harvest of outstanding reviews, for his recordings as much as for his very numerous concerts (several world tours), promises a brilliant future for this latest reference. This ultimate recording of the complete works for and with the piano by Schumann, the pure Saxon of the East, ends by the alpha and omega of his pianistic creation, such as glimpsed and heard in the West, in Rhineland. It thus opens on the Rhine, in Mannheim, with the charming Variations on the name 'Abegg" of 1830 and closes in Düsseldorf with the mysterious variations, called Geistervariationen, composed and copied out in February 1854, just before and right after his attempted suicide in the Rhine, leading to his permanent internment in Endenich (Bonn), facing the sacred river of the Germans...
Described as 'easily the classiest brass ensemble in Britain' by BBC Music Magazine, Onyx Brass continues to be the leading light in establishing the brass quintet as a medium for serious chamber music, presenting it in the entertaining and articulate style that has become the group's trademark. For this, it's third recording for Chandos, Onyx Brass presents a programme steeped in the German romantic tradition. Arrangements for small ensemble of works by Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Rubinstein, and Franz demonstrate the musicality and virtuosity of the group, as well as a wide expressive and textural range. The programme opens and closes with three large-scale works by Richard Strauss, in which the quintet is joined by a host of other top UK brass players and the conductor John Wilson. Festmusik der Stadt Wien for brass and timpani, written for the city of Vienna, is the only original composition: all the others are arrangements made by members of the group.
The desire to explore the innate human drive for communication is the focus of Babel. For this recording the Calidore String Quartet gathered music which transmits ideas by imitating language; its rhythms, cadences and intentions. But it also explores what happens when music substitutes for language. When it fills the void of forbidden speech or even how it carries on when language has been exhausted. The result, a compilation of quartets by Schumann, Shostakovich, and Caroline Shaw, demonstrates the visceral forms of expression that exist at the intersection of music and language. The Calidore String Quartet has been praised by The New York Times for its “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct” and the Los Angeles Times for its balance of “intellect and expression.” Recipient of a 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a 2017 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists, the Calidore String Quartet first made international headlines as winner of the inaugural $100,000 Grand Prize of the 2016 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition. The quartet was the first North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and is currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two).
REVIEW:
The Schumann comes across beautifully, with plenty of tender, intimate inner dialogue and a fine feeling for Schumann’s left-field attitude to conventional form. Maybe there could be more subversive humour, but it’s still refreshing to hear this marvellous, still under-appreciated music treated with such understanding and obvious affection.
Like many contemporary pieces, Caroline Shaw’s Three Essays comes with a detailed programme, but it’s perfectly possible to enjoy it just as abstract music: playful, heartfelt, exuberant and always surprising enough to hold the attention. The playing is as strong and persuasive here as in the Schumann.
As for the Shostakovich, the overall conception is very impressive, each of the linked movements growing out of the previous one with a powerful sense of inevitability. The control of the two/three-in-a-bar rhythmic games in the finale is particularly well brought off. Where it’s slightly weaker – strange, given the disc’s declared intentions – is in that urgent, impassioned directness that characterises the finest Shostakovich quartet performances. Expressive and shapely as they are, the solo lines don’t sound as though they’re burning, aching to confide in you.
This is quality quartet playing, sympathetically recorded, but in the Shostakovich it just falls a couple of inches short of excellent.
This new release is the thirteenth volume in DOREMI’s Svaiatoslav Richter Archives series. Considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, Svaiatoslav Richter was known for his virtuosic technique, vast repertoire, and the depth of his interpretations. On this volume, he performs Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 alongside the USSR State Orchestra, George Georgescu conducting. The performance was recorded live in Moscow in 1958. The other performances are of Etudes on Caprices by Paganini, Marchenbilder for Viola and Piano, and 3 Fantasiestucke for Cello and Piano recorded in 1986, 1985, and 1969, respectively. He is joined on this volume by cellist Pierre Fournier and violist Yuri Bashmet.
“You don’t need a teacher; what you need is an audience.” Those were the words of the great pianist and teacher Alfred Cortot, after the young Rudolf Firkušný had auditioned for him in Paris. Born in southern Moravia in 1912, Firkušný and his mother moved to Brünn after the death of his father. The boy’s musical ability was already in evidence at the domestic piano, where he enthusiastically played by ear tunes that he had heard. A friend of the family accordingly recommended him to the local conservatory, whose teachers included Leoš Janácek. Firkušný’s relationship to Janácek and his works would do much to shape his international career. Janácek concentrated principally on music theory and composition. His career as a concert pianist began in London in 1933 and he was soon playing in the great centres of music across Europe. He travelled to New York in 1938 and went on to tour North and South America. The German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 prompted him to take refuge in Paris, from where he travelled to the USA by way of Portugal in 1940. The persecution and expulsion of Jews from large parts of Europe resulted in a tremendous enrichment of American cultural life by Jewish émigrés. Under the direction of Erich Leinsdorf, the Metropolitan Opera soon assembled a Wagner ensemble of world-class singers; conductors like William Steinberg and George Szell placed their stamp upon orchestras with new repertoire, and the concert halls opened their doors to European soloists. A celebrated concert of 1941 in New York’s Town Hall gave Rudolf Firkušný his own opening to a successful career in the New World. This was further enhanced by his grand tour of South America in 1943 and showed no sign of abating when he returned to his native Czechoslovakia after the end of the war.
REVIEW:
Really special are the violin sonatas op. 120 Nos. 1 & 2 in the version for viola and piano, with violist William Primrose clearly dominating the interpretations. The various piano pieces are technically excellent. A highlight is the very sensitively played sonata by César Franck with the Vienna-born violinist Erica Morini, an artist who formed an ideal duo with Firkusny. Their performances of the Beethoven sonatas in this collection are excellent too. This box also contains only one of Beethoven’s concertos, the Fifth, in a grandiose, energetic and lean interpretation. Firkusny (1912-1994) plays brilliantly and with the greatest precision. But the superiority of the performance is ultimately due to the perfect collaboration between Firkusny and the conductor William Steinberg, who allows the Pittsburgh Symphony to play just as transparently and precisely with a springy, slender sound. Firkusny plays the Piano Sonatas No. 8 (Pathétique), 14 (Moonlight), 21 (Waldstein) with the greatest clarity and attention to detail, with little pedal, and it is certainly not bad to hear these works sometimes so objectively and yet excitingly. Profil’s collection also includes more or less inspired solo recordings of works by Schumann, Schubert, Mozart and Debussy, a very good Piano Sonata in B minor by Chopin, rich in details and sensitively played, as well as Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition played with bravura.
Really special are the violin sonatas op. 120 Nos. 1 & 2 in the version for viola and piano, with violist William Primrose clearly dominating the interpretations. The various piano pieces are technically excellent.
Another highlight is the very sensitively played sonata by César Franck with the Vienna-born violinist Erica Morini, an artist who formed an ideal duo with Firkusny. Their performances of the Beethoven sonatas in this collection are excellent too.
Firkusny's playing in the Beethoven Fifth is brilliant, exhibiting the greatest precision. But the superiority of the performance is ultimately due to the perfect collaboration between Firkusny and the conductor William Steinberg, who allows the Pittsburgh Symphony to play just as transparently and precisely with a springy, slender sound.
Firkusny plays the Piano Sonatas No. 8 (Pathétique), 14 (Moonlight), 21 (Waldstein) with the greatest clarity and attention to detail, with little pedal, and it is certainly not bad to hear these works sometimes so objectively and yet excitingly.
Profil’s collection also includes more or less inspired solo recordings of works by Schumann, Schubert, Mozart and Debussy, a very good Piano Sonata in B minor by Chopin, rich in details and sensitively played, as well as Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition played with bravura.
Given the popularity of Schumann’s A-Minor Piano Concerto, I’d be willing to wager there are readers out there who have amassed recordings of it in double-digit numbers. If you are one of them, you may already have this one in an earlier incarnation, for the performances on this disc are not new. The concerto comes from a 1988 Budapest production; the Introduction and Allegro appassionato, from a 1992 Belgian production; and the Introduction and Allegro, from a 1996 Polish production.
The current release, however, can be recommended for joining this trilogy of Schumann’s concerted works for piano and orchestra on a single disc. In fact, it is the identical program I praised to the heavens in a review of an MDG DVD-A with Christian Zacharias. If you heeded my advice and acquired that disc, the present Naxos recording, and all others, for that matter, are superfluous. Nonetheless, Jenö Jandó, who has become a well-known Naxos commodity, is a very fine pianist whose playing here is technically flawless and interpretively orthodox. Translation? You can’t go wrong.
One minor editorial correction: the note states that Schumann’s two single-movement concert pieces for piano and orchestra, coupled here with the concerto, are his only other works for this combination. Not so. In 1839, he wrote a Konzertsatz in D Minor for piano and orchestra that predates the works on this program. There is a recording of it on a Koch International Classics CD.
With Myrthen, baritone Christian Gerhaher, winner of the 2019 Male Singer of the Year from Opus Klassik, embarks on the second chapter of his once-in-a-lifetime project: the complete recording of Robert Schumann’s lieder output.
Since Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s epoch-making recording of the 1970s, no singer has devoted himself more thoroughly to the lied output of Robert Schumann than Christian Gerhaher. Lauded as the greatest lied singer of our time, he launched his complete cycle of Schumann’s lieder with the album Frage, for which he was named Opus Klassik’s 2019 Male Singer of the Year. The complete recording is the fulfilment of a long-cherished dream and, he emphasises, “probably the most important project of my life”. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung spoke of “consummate vocal artistry. Gerhaher has opened a new door in lied interpretation”. The Guardian named it one of the year’s best new classical releases.
As always, Gerhaher is accompanied by the equally brilliant pianist Gerold Huber. Most of the lieder he will sing himself, but for the other parts, duets and ensembles he has invited singers from his intimate circle of friends who number among the best in their vocal category, including Camilla Tilling, Julia Kleiter, Sibylla Rubens, Wiebke Lehmkuhl and Martin Mitterrutzner.
The complete project will encompass ten CDs, to be issued in a boxed set in 2020. Gerhaher himself is in charge of the project’s conception. Besides Sony Classical, with which he has held an exclusive contract since the onset of his career, he has managed to gain two of his longstanding partners as co-producers in this lavish undertaking: Bavarian Radio and the Heidelberg Spring Festival’s International Song Centre, whose goal is to make artists, concert organisers and audiences alive to the relevance of art song today. Both partners will lend media support to the project.
In the second instalment Gerhaher, Hubert and the Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling will devote themselves to the song cycle Myrthen (Myrtles). It was composed in 1840, Schumann’s “year of song”, when most of his works for voice and piano originated. Conceived as a wedding present for his fiancée Clara Wieck (2019 marks the bicentennial of her birth), Myrthen contains settings of words by nine different poets. As Gerhaher stresses in his notes for the recording, the poems are tightly interrelated in their contents. The sequence Schumann selected creates “not just a picture-book”, Gerhaher writes, “but an anticipatory narrative of the path longed for and awaited by two lovers”, producing “one of the loveliest presents ever bestowed by a loving heart upon another”.
It was in this spirit that Schumann handed Myrthen to Clara on 12 September 1840 in a specially produced luxury edition. Since then it has numbered among the great song cycles in music history.
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REVIEWS:
Tilling’s bright, flexible sound is a perfect foil for Gerhaher’s honeyed warmth. Highlights dotted through the disc include Gerhaher’s performance of Byron’s Aus den Hebräischen Gesängen, with its chromatic, almost Schoenbergian piano introduction. Overall, the disc certainly maintains the standard set by the first one.
– Guardian (UK)
Christian Gerhaher is a deeply impressive singer, as fine as any baritone around in this repertoire. He is expertly accompanied as ever by Gerold Huber, and there is clear well-balanced sound, a very interesting booklet note on the cycle by Gerhaher himself, and full texts and translations.
– MusicWeb International
Written during the late stages of a courtship fraught by opposition from Clara’s father, these 26 songs exalt in the transcendent power of love, and are voiced with exquisite tenderness by German baritone Christian Gerhaher and his partners.
Vladimir Feltsman: The Complete Columbia Album Collection
Sony Masterworks
CD
$39.98Jul 05, 2019
In summer 1987, nine years after he first requested permission to emigrate, the 35-year-old Russian pianist Vladimir Feltsman was finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Feltsman, who had studied at the Moscow Conservatory with the legendary Yakov Flier and won first prize at the prestigious Long-Thibaud Competition in Paris at the age of 19, arrived in New York amid a welter of publicity. CBS Masterworks offered him a recording contract, while President Ronald Reagan welcomed him to the White House for a recital that was glowingly reviewed in the New York Times.
When Feltsman made his Carnegie Hall debut two months later, the Times hailed him as “an artist of wide musical interests who on this occasion included three pieces from Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésusto set off more popular works by Schubert and Schumann … Mr. Feltsman took an aptly spacious and relaxed approach to the first two movements [of Schubert’s A major Sonata D 664)] … He then let loose in the more brilliant Allegro finale with an impressive display of breathtaking scales … In the Messiaen, Mr. Feltsman drew out its great, clashing sonorities and made light of its technical terrors. At the conclusion of Schumann’sSymphonic Etudes, any lingering doubts about Mr. Feltsman’s pianistic strengths or artistic instincts were blown away.”
Interest in Feltsman’s pianism had already been piqued before the pianist set foot in the New World by a performance, released by CBS in 1986, of the Chopin Preludes recorded in Moscow. “Feltsman sweeps through the 24 Preludes with genuine poetic bravura,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “There is a daring and Romantic fire in the playing which only add to the agony of his plight.”
Now Sony Classical is reissuing that Carnegie debut recital from 1987, a Russian Chopin recording that preceded it and an even earlier Schubert recital, from Paris in 1978, along with all the other Feltsman performances captured by CBS mics before his collaboration with the label ended in 1989. Among them are a live Liszt recital including the B minor Sonata and a live Rachmaninoff coupling of the Third Concerto andRhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic: “Feltsman’s pianistic control compels admiration. He is a commanding player.” (Gramophone).
He also recorded the First and Third Tchaikovsky concertos with Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra under Mstislav Rostropovich, who, wrote Gramophone’s reviewer, “coaxes out playing of the very highest quality – rich-toned, idiomatic in inflexion, with just the right degree of thrust when required … [Feltsman’s] is a relatively laid back view of the First Concerto – no screaming in the outer movements, no flash-fingered shallowness in the central prestissimo of the slow movement. The big first movement cadenza is wonderfully fluid and continuous, and the transition into the following coda is a dream. There is much sensitive dialogue between piano and orchestra, well captured by the recording … a performance one can learn from, and the Third Concerto goes splendidly.”
Feltsman’s last CBS recording featured the first two Prokofiev Piano Concertos and ten pieces from Romeo and Juliet: “One has only to hear the refinement of colour he produces in ‘Romeo bids Juliet farewell’ … or the clarity and lightness of articulation in the First Concerto to realize that he possesses not only formidable fingers but very considerable artistry … The LSO under Michael Tilson Thomas produce excellent support … Again [in Concerto No. 2] there is splendid pianism from Feltsman and cultured playing from Tilson Thomas and the LSO.”
SET CONTENTS:
DISC 1: Chopin: Préludes, Op. 28
DISC 2: Schubert: Fantasy in C Major, Op. 15, D. 760 "Wanderer" Schubert: Moments musicaux, Op. 94, D. 780
DISC 3: Schubert: Sonata for Piano in A Major, Op. 120, D. 664 Messiaen: Vingt regards sur L'enfant-Jésus
DISC 4: Schumann: Symphonic Études (Variations) in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 13 Rachmaninoff: Prélude in G-Sharp Minor, Op. 32, No. 12 Beethoven: 6 Variations on an Original Theme in D Major, Op. 76
DISC 5: Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 30 Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 Conductor: Zubin Mehta Performer: Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
DISC 6: Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-Flat Major, Op. 10 Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 16 (1923 Version) Prokofiev: 10 Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75: No. 10, Romeo and Juliet before Parting Conductor: Michael Tilson Thomas Orchestra: London Symphony Orchestra
DISC 7: Liszt: Sonata in B Minor Liszt: Tre Sonetti di Petrarca Liszt: St. Francis d'Assise: La predication aux oiseaux
DISC 8: Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 75: Allegro brillante Conductor: Mstislav Rostropovich Orchestra: National Symphony Orchestra
Schumann: Piano Quintet - Piano Quartet - Märchenerzählungen
Naxos
CD
$13.99$19.99Save 30%Sep 25, 2012
Between 1841 and 1843 Schumann wrote some of his greatest chamber works, among them the Piano Quartet and the Piano Quintet, both in E flat major. Written in an astonishing five-day period, the Quintet displays both the heroic and the lyric impulses in his music, boldness contrasting with songful tenderness, and march themes with lyricism. The Piano Quartet also exudes such qualities, not least in the ravishing slow movement, and the masterful breadth of Schumann's expression. The four Meñrchenerzahlungen are happy, energetic pieces. Winning high praise from the American press, pianist Xiayin Wang has toured with the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra in St Petersburg itself, as well as in the United States. Founded in Chicago in 1946, and based at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee since 1963, the Fine Arts Quartet is one of the elite few to have recorded and toured internationally for over half a century.
