Pianist Luiza Borac plays Bach's Goldberg Variations and Canons, transcriptions of Bach works by Lipatti, Busoni, Kempff, and Siloti, concluding with Chick Corea's Children's Songs.

REVIEW:

There is no attempt on Borac’s part (unlike some other famous pianists) to suggest the sonority of the harpsichord. But her playing has a clarity and deftness of touch entirely appropriate for this repertoire. Borac’s superb technique, crystalline tone, and seamless legato provide the utmost pleasure.

The remaining Bach items embody a comparable level of artistry, both unaffected and highly expressive. Jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs were inspired in part by Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. Borac, who participated in some of Corea’s workshops, and found them “unforgettable and matchless,” plays the songs with masterful technique, captivating energy, and pervasive joy. She dedicates this recital “to the memory of my father George Borac.” What a beautiful musical tribute, and gift to us all. Highest recommendation.

— Fanfare (Ken Meltzer)

The celebrated violinist Francesca Dego is joined by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and her regular collaborator Dalia Stasevska for this recording of the violin concertos by Brahms and Busoni.

A cornerstone of the repertoire, Brahms’s Concerto dates from 1878, a year after the Second Symphony, and was composed for (and dedicated to) the virtuoso Joseph Joachim. The Concerto takes the standard three-movement form, and as in Beethoven’s Concerto (considered by many as Brahms’s inspiration for the work) the first movement is significant in its length and its complexity.

Busoni’s Violin Concerto in its turn is inspired by both Brahms and Beethoven, and like both previous works it is in the key of D major. Premièred in Berlin in 1897 by the Dutch violinist Henri Petri, the Concerto is dazzlingly virtuosic. Francesca Dego writes: ‘To be able to record Brahms’s Violin Concerto is a dream and a milestone for every violinist and I feel that with “my” Brahms I do not want to compete with the many gorgeous versions out there but instead to declare my own love and history with my favorite violin concerto. Busoni’s Concerto, however, is a rarely performed work, brought to the studio only a handful of times. It represents a different kind of responsibility, one that pushed me to want to rediscover every detail of this music as if it had never been played before.’

Ferruccio Busoni (Empoli 1866 – Berlin 1924) died the same year as Puccini and was born when Puccini was a child, yet he was way more than an opera composer. While he lived several years in Trieste and some time in Bologna, he mainly lived abroad and spent the second half of his life in Berlin. Way more than a composer, he was a wide-ranging artist and musician, an acclaimed concert pianist and sought-after piano teacher, a learned reviser of piano music, and the author of many and varied pieces. Busoni was also an aesthete, an intellectual, a music reformer, and author of texts on musical topics. A child prodigy, he wrote the Symphonische Suite for orchestra at the age of 17.
Nicola Bignami and Lucija Majstorovic brilliantly face the arduous task of performing the two monumental and demanding sonatas for violin and piano that the composer wrote at twenty-four (first sonata) and at thirty-two (second sonata), in which the equal and dialogical relationship between the two instruments combines with a wealth of invention with respect for the great tradition.

SOMM Recordings is happy to present the fourth release in the planned First Recordings of the complete Beethoven Symphonies in the legendary edition for piano duet by Xaver Scharwenka, continuing a direct connection to Beethoven via his teacher Franz Kullak who studied with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny, played by the ‘wholly exceptional’ duo of Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman.

This new CD couples Beethoven’s Symphonies 1 & 6 ‘Pastoral’ together with Busoni’s brilliant Concertino BV88 on a theme of Mozart K. 459, for Two Pianos. Extract from the Duo’s recent Gramophone Blog: We would like to highlight our personal historical connection to this music – particularly the Zeitgeist of Berlin, the city where Scharwenka lived and worked. Tessa’s mother Helga Bassel was a concert pianist who also hailed from Berlin, and in the 1930s had to seek refuge in Cape Town. She was indeed fortunate to be able to leave Germany accompanied by her Blüthner grand piano and her collection of piano music which included Scharwenka’s duo transcriptions of the nine Beethoven symphonies.”

Previous releases in this ground-breaking set have received outstanding reviews: ‘Uys and Schoeman play marvellously...SOMM’s fine sonics do justice both to the performers and to their superbly regulated Steinway model D concert grand’ (Classics Today); ‘I was immediately struck by the orchestral quality of their sound – this is an exhilarating account’ (Rebecca Franks, BBC Music Magazine); ‘The result is stunning...these are two superb pianists who breathe through all this music as if they were one’ (Gramophone); ‘In a pure state...the work’s argument has a drivenness and gloriousness that seems to define what a musical argument might be...’ (The Sunday Times); ‘This is undoubtedly superb musicianship throughout’ (Musical Opinion). This new recording is fully up to the superlative standards with which this most gifted of piano duo’s previous recordings have been acclaimed. SOMM is proud to continue this unique integral series of world premiere Beethoven releases.

[The] new three-CD set titled “Zimmermann: Recomposed,” on the German Wergo label, is among the standout releases of 2022. -- The New York Times

Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–1970) was one of the most distinctive composers in the musical avant-garde after the Second World War. While Karlheinz Stockhausen served as a kind of ‘generator’ in Cologne during the 1950s and 60s, inventing completely new sounds and techniques, Zimmermann was in many ways his opposite, a ‘transformer’ who redefined previously existing material by placing it in new contexts and collage-like structures, anticipating the ideas of the Postmodernists. Zimmermann created these new contexts on many levels.

Especially in his younger years, he arranged and orchestrated songs and piano pieces using brash and daring instrumental colors. These arrangements then found their way into his works that are now recognized as modern masterpieces: “Alagoana”, “Konzert”, “Sinfonie in einem Satz”, “Stille und Umkehr”, etc. His self-composed works employing numerous quotations as well as his arrangements ‘recomposing’ previously existing music are juxtaposed in the excellent recordings presented by WERGO in this collection. It contains more than three hours of music as well as an extensive booklet with a wealth of information and an interview with Heinz Holliger, the guiding spirit behind this production.

Holliger conducted all of the recordings and has worked for years to ensure that Zimmermann’s long-forgotten arrangements were rescued, published, performed, and recorded. The performances and recordings took place as part of the celebrations organized by the WDR in Cologne in honor of Zimmermann’s 100th birthday. This new release from WERGO presents a fresh perspective on the composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, whose tragic suicide shortly after the completion of “Stille und Umkehr” shocked the musical world. His fascinating instrumental effects and his embrace of popular and traditional music make his works feel much more at home in our contemporary world than they did in the cultural atmosphere of his time, with its faith with technology and progress.

“One of the most important advantages that the Luxembourg citizen has when abroad is that linguistically and culturally we embrace both the German and the French cultures...This gives a Luxemburger, particularly one active in the arts or the cultural environment, a different outlook and approach,” suggested Luxembourg composer Alexander Müllenbach in an interview. Perhaps it is this different perspective, the quite individual, open approach, that Françoise Groben herself had, a quality that she brought to her performance of German and French compositions for the cello. And it is for that reason that Banque Générale de Luxembourg placed at her disposal an exquisite instrument built by Matteo Goffriller in 1695.

Françoise Groben was born in Luxembourg on December 4, 1965. She received her first lessons in the cello at the age of five at the city’s Conservatoire, studying there with Francine Weber-Deprelle, Jean Join und Georges Mallach. She eventually completed her studies with Boris Pergamenschikov at the Cologne Musikhochschule, graduating in her concert examination, while continuing to attend master classes given by such artists as Daniil Shafran in Moscow or William Pleeth in London, or by the Amadeus Quartet. From 1974 onwards she was a member of the ensemble Les Musiciens founded by her father, Joseph Groben, and was only 15 when she first played in the Youth Orchestra of the European Union, going on to perform under such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti. The recordings collected here illustrate the entire spectrum of Françoise Groben’s artistic interests, demonstrating that she was not only a leading soloist but also a gifted and coveted chamber musician who regularly included pieces by Luxembourg composers in her programs and was strongly committed to contemporary female composers.

Peter Donohoe CBE studied at Chetham’s School of Music and Leeds University before going on to study at the Royal Northern College of Music with Derek Wyndham and in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod. He is acclaimed as one of the foremost pianists of our time, for his musicianship, stylistic versatility, and commanding technique. He first came across the works of Busoni in the early 1980s and, as he states in his booklet note, ‘Busoni’s contribution to the musical history of the twentieth century is inestimable, and I feel very much enriched by the several decades of my exposure to it.’ The program he has chosen includes three of the pinnacles of Busoni’s virtuosic output: the Toccata, BV 287, the seven Elegien, and the Sonatina on Bizet’s Carmen, alongside the much earlier Bach transcription of which Peter Donohoe writes: ‘The Toccata, in particular, has always struck me as one of the most joyous pieces in the history of instrumental music, and Busoni’s transcription certainly brings out that joy.’

On Nostalghia, his second PENTATONE album, pianist Francesco Piemontesi presents original works of Bach, alongside Bach transcriptions and works inspired by Bach from Ferruccio Busoni, Wilhelm Kempff and Maximilian Schnaus. Whereas many modern-day musicians aim to revive the instruments used in Bach’s own time, Piemontesi explores the tradition of Bach transcriptions for piano. This tradition started in the nineteenth-century, found its most prominent exponent in Busoni, and is still alive today, as Schnaus’s transcription of Kommst du nun, Jesu, vom Himmel herunter demonstrates. Despite using an instrument not yet existing in the composer’s time, Busoni and others sought to interpret Bach’s music with utmost reverence and study, expanding our notions of authenticity and Werktreue. For Piemontesi, playing Bach through the eyes of Busoni, Kempff and Schnaus incites a sense of nostalgia, re-establishing the ties to a rich pianistic tradition. The album title refers to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, a 1983 film about nostalgia and the untranslatability of art and culture. Francesco Piemontesi is among the most-cherished pianists of our age, and presents the second fruit of his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE, having released the acclaimed Schubert - Last Piano Sonatas in 2019.

Following his critically acclaimed debut Liszt Transfigured: Operatic Fantasies for Piano, which won the 40th Liszt Ferenc International Grand Prix du Disque in 2018, Chiyan Wong returns to record his second album for Linn. Alongside the piano music of Liszt, the music of Ferruccio Busoni has been a guiding light for the young, eclectic pianist. Here Chiyan combines Busoni’s kaleidoscopic arrangement of Bach’s famous Goldberg Variations, which celebrates the powerful sonority and range of the modern concert grand, with Bach’s timeless original. Chiyan’s ‘dazzling technical finish’ (Gramophone) and luxuriant sound are on full display in Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s famous Chaconne, a classic in the genre. Inversion, mirroring and variations are also idiomatic devices in Busoni’s Sonatina ‘in diem Nativitatis Christi MCMXVII and Chiyan’s own ‘composition etude’, Inversion of Variation 15 (Canone alla quinta), which complete this one-of-a-kind programme.

Ferruccio Busoni composed a significant number of works for two pianos throughout his life. While Bach’s pervasive influence is already evident in some of his early compositions including the Preludio e Fuga and Capriccio, it reaches its most complex and glorious expression in the definitive 1921 version of his Fantasia contrappuntistica. In the case of Schumann’s Op. 134 for piano and orchestra, Busoni simply reduced the orchestral part for a second piano. However, his skill as a master transcriber and composer is revealed in his brilliant arrangements of Mozart’s works, which also highlight the subtlety and originality of his style. Aldo Orvieto has recorded extensively, releasing more than 70 albums dedicated to composers of the 20th century on a wide variety of labels, many receiving critical acclaim. Aldo Ciccolini appeared on the Naxos release of Achille Longo’s PianoQuintet (Ciccolini’s teacher) with the Circolo Artistico Ensemble (8.572628), which was nominated for an International Classical Music Award (ICMA).Classical Lost and Found wrote that: ‘Considering Ciccolini’s intimate association with his mentor’s quintet, this would have to be considered a definitive performance.’ Marco Rapetti received his Diploma cum laude at the Accademia Perosi in Biella. Rapetti has been awarded many prizes in national and international competitions, and has released several recordings, including the complete piano works of Borodin, Liadov, Dukas and Debussy.

Ferruccio Busoni was undoubtedly what can be termed a ‘child prodigy’. His maturity as a young pianist can only be indirectly evidenced by contemporary reports. But in his early compositions, his astonishing command of the meter can be assessed directly. In particular, he demonstrated a sure instinct for part writing and counterpoint, before he had received systematic teaching in these disciplines. Busoni connoisseurs will detect unexpected parallels to the works of his mature period; their germ cells, as it were. And the common music lover may find joy in a wealth of piano pieces, some of which at least need not shy any comparison with Schumann, Mendelssohn, Reinecke and Grieg.