Shot in various venues in Vincenca, Vienna, Turin, Padua between 1986 and 1987.

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 101 mins
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 9)

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CHOPIN Piano Sonata No. 2, “Funeral March.” Polonaise in f?, op. 44. Prelude in B?, op. 28/21. BEETHOVEN Piano Sonatas: No. 27; No. 32. SCRIABIN Etude, op. 8/2. 2 Poems, op. 32 • Ivo Pogorelich (pn) • C MAJOR 701308 (DVD: 101:00)


This video was filmed in 1987, when Pogorelich was in his late-20s. The locale is an ornate Italian villa with excellent acoustics. The sound engineering has held up very well, and the camerawork is unobtrusive. There is no showmanship. Pogorelich simply plays the music, without jumping about or making faces. He has one of the most compulsively watchable pairs of hands I’ve ever seen. I haven’t been this taken with the physical act of a pianist’s playing since I saw Earl Wild play the Gershwin Concerto in 1986. There is a balance of form and function in Pogorelich’s hands that is just enthralling. Pogorelich performs the Chopin and the Scriabin in a black tunic, switching to a plain blue shirt for the Beethoven. Perhaps there’s something revealing in that. The video footage was originally divided into five separate television programs, which simply are played here in succession. I didn’t find this distracting.


I believe Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata was one of the works Pogorelich performed in the 1980 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. That was where Martha Argerich resigned from the jury after Pogorelich’s elimination, calling him “a genius.” This video contains a great rendition of the sonata. Even the brief introductory chords are dramatic and arresting. In the first movement, Pogorelich has a beautiful response to the second subject, varying it with richness and nobility on each of its appearances, the third time giving it beautiful tone coloring. The scherzo features a dynamic left hand, while its second subject is highly rhapsodic. The opening of the Marche funèbre is grand, even triumphant, whereas its second subject is shaded nocturnally. The return of the Marche is terrifying, leading to the finale’s splendid virtuosic chaos. Throughout the sonata Pogorelich’s conception is bold, dynamic, and vivid.


The remaining Chopin works are equally impressive. The polonaise is freely shaped, colorful, and propulsive. The return of its main theme at the end is immense and thrilling. Pogorelich’s interpretation of the prelude is slow and stately. He brings the same ingratiating talents as a miniaturist to the short works by Scriabin. They highlight his craftsmanship as a subtle colorist and superb technician. The étude is languorous. As for the Two Poems , the first is dreamy, while the second is torrential.


Pogorelich’s Beethoven is more provocative, owing to his preference for slow tempos. In the first movement of Sonata No. 27, I prefer to think of his tempo not as slow but as spacious. The music’s structure always is apparent. In the final movement, Pogorelich offers a truthful representation of Beethoven’s cantabile marking. This issue, however, bedevils the last sonata. In its first movement, Pogorelich’s concept of maestoso is assisted by his ability to clarify voices. This movement’s contrast of virtuosity and repose seems here to prefigure Liszt. Things bog down, unfortunately, in the last movement. There Pogorelich takes the adagio molto marking too literally, interfering in his slowness with the other instruction for cantabile playing. His phrasing becomes choppy. Beethoven did offer the instruction semplice , but that doesn’t mean to proceed so slowly as to be simple-minded. I watched this DVD four times before writing this review, and the last movement of Sonata No. 32 was the only performance I grew weary of.


If you are collecting these works on CD, I can make some recommendations. In the Chopin sonata, I like Cécile Ousset (whose muscularity recalls Pogorelich), Leif Ove Andsnes, and Idil Biret. Richard Goode and Bernard Roberts are interesting in both of the Beethoven sonatas. For No. 32, there also are fine recordings by Bruce Hungerford, Jerome Rose, and, on a Graf fortepiano, Peter Serkin. Scriabin’s Two Poems appears in a lyrical presentation by the Russian-American pianist Dmitry Paperno, on a lovely collection of shorter works titled Through the Years . As for Pogorelich’s DVD, it is fascinating and compulsively watchable almost all the way through. If you can overlook some rather zany Beethoven, it might be for you.


FANFARE: Dave Saemann

Classical Music

PARIS AND BURGUNDY



 


The Places
This musical tour of France starts in Paris with scenes that reflect the modenisation of the city in the 19th century under Baron Haussmann. From Paris the tour passes to Burgundy, with its vineyards, to Provence, with its Fête des Gardiens in Arles and Roman aqueduct, thence to the Loire, with its great castles and country-houses. The tour ends with a visit to Brittany and Normandy, the northern coasts and the great monastery of Mont Saint-Michel.


 


The Music
Music for the tour is taken from Fryderyk Chopin's two piano concertos. The son of a French émigré and a Polish mother, Chopin left his native Warsaw in 1830, settling in the following year in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1849. His piano concertos were written and first performed in Warsaw in 1830, and seemed a necessary part of his stock-in-trade for a planned career as a virtuoso. In the event Chopin found a more congenial role in Paris as a performer in private society salons and as a fashionable teacher.


 


Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: Dolby Digital / DTS Surround
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 78 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

Classical Music

Luca Fiorentini and Jakub Tchorzewski’s concert was recorded on September 25, 2014 at the Oratorio San Filippo Neri in Bologna as part of the “Il Nuovo l’Antico” section of the XXXIII edition of the Bologna Festival. “Il Nuovo l’Antico” was in turn divided into two cycles: “Delizie e Tenebre” and “La Triade Polacca: Chopin-Szymanowski-Lutoslawski”, conceived by the artistic director of the Festival, the Venetian musicologist Prof. Mario Messinis – former artistic director of the Biennale Musica in Venice and of the RAI Orchestras of Turin and Milan, as well as superintendent of the Teatro La Fenice in Venice -, to whom this recording is dedicated. The duo Fiorentini-Tchorzewski presented a repertoire that spans more than a century, adding to the “triad” the living Polish composer Krzysztof Meyer. The cycle “La Triade Polacca: Chopin-Szymanowski-Lutoslawski” was organized in collaboration with the Polish Institute of Rome.

“Chopin’s four ballades occupy a special place in the collective mind of classical pianists. To many, each is a jewel of the Romantic era, models of poetic lyricism.” (Sam Reich) Israeli pianist Dror Biran performs these works with great mastery and sensitivity. Dror Biran is one of Israel’s most admired and gifted pianists. His playing has been described in Die Beeld as “powerful, but also beautifully sensitive”. The Plain Dealer added “his fortissimos crashed and roared, but next to them came pianissimos that whispered seductively…he has technique to burn and uses it effectively…” His superb tonal control combined with interesting phrasing and voicing has won him consistent critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences.

For the seventh volume of his Chopin project, the Canadian pianist and exclusive Chandos Artist Louis Lortie has built a program that includes works from the earliest to the latest periods in the composer’s life, all of which are linked by their evocation of ‘nationality’ – Italy, Spain and of course Chopin’s beloved Poland. The Rondo à la Mazur, Op. 5 and the Rondo, Op. 16 are examples of this longer form that was linked with the ‘brilliant’ style of piano writing popular in the 1820’s. Chopin soon moved away from this style, in search of a more progressive compositional style. Composed around the same time as the Op. 16 Rondo, the Boléro, Op. 19 evokes the exoticism of Spain, whilst the Tarantella Op. 43 reflects the Parisian vogue for the southern Italian dance sparked by Auber’s grand opera ‘La Muette de Portici’. Now one of his most celebrated works, the Polonaise, Op. 53 represented for Chopin the culmination of his project, begun with the two Polonaises, Op. 26, to imbue the genre with powerful national symbolism. These works are interspersed with four sets of Mazurkas, Opp. 17, 30, 63, and 68. Chopin almost single-handedly introduced the Mazurka to Paris when he arrived there in the late 1820s, and continued to compose them throughout his life, transforming the Polish dance form into some of his most dazzling and memorable compositions.

Sachiko Furuhata was born in Yokohama, Japan, and completed her piano studies at the Tokyo Conservatory. Further studies took her to Germany at the Detmold University of Music and the Robert Schumann University in Düsseldorf. Her teachers include Roberto Szidon, Detlev Kraus, Naoyuki Taneda and Willem Brons. Her concert activities have taken her to Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Japan. With this third recital album, Sachiko Furuhata takes up selected works by Frédéric Chopin. With the famous etudes, the nocturnes and waltzes, different moods are singled out and compare so that an independent Chopin portrait is drawn.

Julia Kociuban is considered as one of the leading polish pianists of her generation. Her debut solo album ‘Schumann, Chopin, Bacewicz’ was praised by critics as one of the most interesting Polish piano debuts of the past years. Her two albums with Bacewicz and Tansman Piano Concertos and Quintets were nominated for the Polish Music Industry Prize ‘Fryderyk’. She has already been invited to perform in renowned European concert halls including the Herkulessall in Munich, the Konzerthaus of Vienna and of Berlin and the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg. She has also performed in America and Asia and at the most known international music festivals in the world, including La Rouge d’Antheron, La Folle Journée, Kissinger Sommer, The Young Euro Classic Piano Festival, and The Ludwig van Beethoven Easter Festival.

Kociuban graduated from the Royal College of Music in London, Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg and Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw where she studied with Dmitri Alexeev, Pavel Gililov and Piotr Paleczny. In 2019 she received her doctoral degree in music, and a year later she completed postgraduate studies for cultural managers at the Warsaw School of Economics. Alongside her solo career Julia Kociuban teaches at the Bacewicz University of Music in Lodz (Poland). She is also a founder and director of BISMA Bacewicz International Summer Music Academy. On the present release she presents a showcase of Polish Polonaises.

He was the king of the piano, and his homeland was the land of poetry: Frédéric Chopin. And a new GENUIN album by Viacheslav Apostel-Pankratowsky is dedicated to his compositions. The young pianist has chosen a fine selection of nocturnes and waltzes, prefacing them like an overture, so to speak, with the famous Military Polonaise. The carefully thought-out program takes us on a poetic journey through Chopin's world; tonal relationships create new perspectives and approaches to seemingly well-known works. Apostel-Pankratowsky's fine piano playing traces the intricacies of these incredible miniatures with extreme precision and detail!

“Alberto Nones executes Chopin’s music with restrained elegance and poise, avoiding the trappings of indulgent virtuosity or sentimentality. Instead, these performances demonstrate unencumbered fidelity to the composer’s directions; it is almost as if we can hear Chopin’s own breath between each line and phrase.” (George Richford)

Having previously recorded Chopin's Mazurkas, Alberto Nones here performs the Fantasy-Impromptu in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 66, the Fantasy in F Minor, Op. 49, and the Polonaise No. 7 in A-Flat Major, Op. 61, "Polonaise-fantaisie."

Nones, a pianist and philosopher/music historian, is Professor of Piano at the "E.R. Duni" Conservatory of Music in Matera, where he also teaches courses of History and Historiography of Music. He graduated summa cum laude in Piano from the "F.A. Bonporti" Conservatory of Music in Trento, where he studied with Antonella Costa, and specialized in Masterclasses and Academies with Masters like Paul Badura-Skoda and Franco Scala. He has won several piano competitions, among which a first prize at the "Coppa Pianisti d'Italia" in Osimo in 1996. Convinced though that music is art and culture, he also graduated in Philosophy magna cum laude from the University of Bologna, went on to study at the London School of Economics, where he earned his M.Sc. in Political Theory, and completed his education in the humanities with a Ph.D. in International Studies at the University of Trento.

Pianist Xiaoya Liu has captured the imagination of worldwide audiences through her profound artistry and charismatic performances as concerto soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician across Asia, Europe, and the United States with orchestras such as the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, Marquette Symphony Orchestra, Round Rock Symphony, University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, U-M Life Sciences Orchestra, GSIM Festival Orchestra, and in venues including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Hill Auditorium, Palazzo Biscari, and Shanghai Concert Hall. On this release she plays a program of works by Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, and Griffes.

REVIEW:

Having reviewed Xiaoya Liu’s brilliant edition of Carl Vine’s four piano sonatas elsewhere, I was not at all surprised by the superb technique, sensitivity, and individuality that this gifted pianist brings to each and every selection throughout this release.

Her Mozart C minor Fantasy is a model of perfect pacing, where elegance and drama merge as one. Liu transforms Chopin’s early and flashy Rondo Op. 1 into something more substantial, pointedly shaping the decorative right-hand flourishes and creating shimmering sonorities with impressively discreet pedaling.

I’ve rarely heard such a feathery and scintillating Liszt Bagatelle Without Tonality, so different from Alfred Brendel’s harder-edged traversal. It assiduously leads into a comparably imaginative and convincingly capricious Valse oubliée No. 1. She plays the lyrical Romance oubliée beautifully, although I find the late Joel Hasting’s Naxos recording slightly warmer and fuller in body.

Why Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ compact and substantial 1918 Piano Sonata remains on the recital repertoire’s fringes is an utter mystery. Its sensuous melodies, potent expressivity, and idiomatic yet orchestrally-inspired keyboard textures easily warrant a “Great American Piano Sonata” ranking alongside Ives, Barber, Carter, and Copland. It’s also interesting how certain of the tumultuous finale’s figurations presage Prokofiev’s Seventh sonata, composed a quarter century later. Liu may not quite match Garrick Ohlsson, Stephen Beus, or Reed Tetzloff for high-voltage profile in the outer movements (they also benefit from stronger sonic presence), yet one cannot deny her narrative grasp and intelligently scaled dynamics. How ironic that a release entitled “The Forgotten” turns out to be unforgettable, and, more importantly, recommendable.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

Following the acclaimed Brahms recording in 2021, Emmanuel Despax presents his sixth album with Signum Classics: Chopin Piano Concertos (chamber versions) with Chineke! Chamber Ensemble. “Chopin’s Piano Concertos are among his first and most significant points of departure, a marked liberation from the constraints of an early but short-lived respect for custom and tradition... I would say that the exceptional nature of this Chopin recording lies in the combination of the chamber music, quintet slimmed-down version of the Piano Concertos complemented by a pianist who plays with an almost epic size and grandeur.” (Bryce Morrison)

Emmanuel Despax has gained worldwide recognition as a singular artist, whose interpretations bring a rare sincerity and imagination to the music. Chineke! was founded in 2015 by the double bass player, Chi-chi Nwanoku OBE, to provide career opportunities for established and up-and-coming Black and ethnically diverse classical musicians in the UK and Europe. The Chineke! Chamber Ensemble comprises the principal players of the Chineke! Orchestra.

REVIEWS:

Chineke!'s accomplished and delightful playing forced at least this particular listener to pay greater than usual attention to music that can sometimes seem little more than a lengthy introduction to the piano-enriched score to come. This is, then, a quite delightful and distinguished release with an individual character of its own. It has been expertly recorded, moreover, in first-rate sound. While, as we’ve noted, the chamber versions of the Chopin concertos have done rather well on CD over the years, the new disc can hold its own with any of the others and will certainly not disappoint anyone who buys it.

--MusicWeb International

[The] brilliant young French pianist, Emmanuel Despax, already well known in Europe and according to Gramophone magazine, “A formidable talent, fleet of finger, elegant of phrase and a true keyboard colourist”...collected five string players (the Cheneke! Chamber Ensemble) to perform Chopin’s two piano concertos with the orchestra reduced to a string quintet, so what we have here is effectively a piano sextet. 

Chopin’s orchestration has been much criticized over the last centuries...but since the piano plays almost continuously, this version with smaller forces is quite enjoyable.

--The WholeNote

The brilliant Nikolai Kapustin wrote music for himself. Having to explain the exact place where the divide between his obvious deep love and influence of Jazz and Classical lies must have left him feeling tired and resentful of agreeing to talk about his unique work. Kapustin simply did not wish to put energy into it, compared to the actual act of composition. (Incidentally, the answer is: there is no such divide for him, so perhaps listening without the expectation of one can put us closer to the magical place from which he operated.) His music could only come from such an infinitely curious spirit, molded by rigorous Classical training in Russia and a highly developed love and talent for Jazz.

Melanie Spanswick's Enigma, composed in February 2019 especially for Japanese pianist Yuki Negishi, is a miniature programmatic work that inhabits a dreamy, atmospheric sound world. It employs the full range of the keyboard and seeks to showcase the enigmatic resonance of the instrument. Works new (by Robert Mitchell) and old (by Frédéric Chopin) round out the selections, and Bill Evans's Peace Piece instills a final calm and catharsis.

In this recording, Jan Michiels transports us back to the Parisian salons of the 19th century. These were not only an ideal environment for Chopin – his Préludes op. 28 are a recurring thread throughout this album – but also for Debussy, whose Préludes are closely correlated with those of Chopin. Michiels opens his salon to various visitors: first Alfred Cortot, whose Chopin interpretations captivated generations of pianists, then György Ligeti and finally his friend György Kurtág. Michiels likes to dream that the 1894 Érard grand piano on which the Préludes by Chopin and Debussy were recorded might once have adorned a salon that Proust visited. “I wondered whether music was not the only example of how souls might have communicated if language had not been invented, words formulated and ideas analyzed. It is like a possibility that has not been acted upon."