Naxos’ survey of Liszt’s piano music seems to have been progressing in dribs and drabs, with little fanfare since its launch more than 20 years ago. However, if you’re a fan of Liszt and the highest order of transcendental virtuosity, grab Volume 41 right away. I first became aware of Han Chen, winner of the 2013 China International Piano Competition, as a commanding new music pianist, one of many in New York. He’s also a composer. Since most new music pianists don’t bother with Liszt (and when they do, it’s usually awful), I was prepared for the worst. Instead, I heard the best!
It isn’t just Chen’s assured, elegant and totally effortless technique that blows me away, it’s also his idiomatic flair, his use of color and touch to convey character, plus a gift for textural variety and differentiation that one associates with golden age legends. Listen to the Bellini Sonnambula Fantasy’s carefully sculpted climaxes and how the final pages’ buckets of chords and runs sing out with no strain, struggle or imbalance whatsoever. The Polonaise from I Puritani swaggers with joyful scintillation, while the convoluted thematic juggling in the Freischütz Fantasy conveys a sense of lightness and play that Leslie Howard’s premier recording keeps under wraps. The engineering replicates how a well-regulated concert grand sounds in a small hall with a luminous yet not overly resonant acoustic. Need I say more? - ClassicsToday

The new series "Master of The Guitar" is dedicated to the players that made the history of 20th c. guitar. This first volume, Spain: 1925-63 includes rare recordings by the most important Spanish performers, many coming to us in precarious sound quality that has been restored with new digital re-mastering, allowing listeners to appreciate the beauty and art of the performances. An example of the re-mastering job can be heard on the tracks of Llobet e Narciso Yepes, unlistenable until now because of their technical flaws, here restored to their original, acoustic-era quality.

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This release continues the IDIS tradition of remastering and rediscovering the most important performers of the Legendary Guitar Spanish School. This collection has very rare tracks coming directly from private collectors' discographies.

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Elisa Tomellini began her piano studies at age five. She went on to graduate from the Conservatory of Milan. Tomellini has been touted as a real and authentic piano virtuosi, and this album presents her as an artist with a brilliant future. Included on this disc is Rachmaninov's Moments Musicaux op. 16. This is known as one of the most difficult works of Rachmaninov repertoire, but Tomellini performs with fluency and spontaneity that makes the difficulties of the piece seem to disappear. Rounding out the album are works by Piazzolla, which are performed here with exuberance and poeticism. Tomellini transcribed and arranged these pieces herself.

A contemporary of Beethoven, Antoine de Lhoyer was a French royalist and professional soldier who was considered "the best guitar player in Europe", and whose complicated life story took him from anti-Revolutionary campaigns to a high position at the court in St. Petersburg. This collection brings together his elegant and virtuosic chamber works for three and four guitars, characterised by free dialogue between the instruments in music both dashingly brilliant and dreamily lyrical. The Air varie et dialogue can claim to be the earliest guitar quartet in the repertory.

Solo piano transcriptions of music from the operas of composer Giacomo Meyerbeer form the focus of Vol. 40 in the Naxos Complete Piano Music of Franz Liszt project. Sergio Gallo takes on the herculean task of playing the three-part Illustrations du Prophète, S414/R223, a work lasting nearly three-quarters of an hour, in addition to the 20-minute plus Illustrations de L’Africaine, S415/R224 and two briefer examples of Lisztian transcription fireworks embedded between these two knuckle busters. Mr. Gallo currently teaches at two US institutions, one being Georgia State University in Atlanta.

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Helmut Walcha was one of the most influential organists of the 20th century. His Chorale Preludes are works of considerable expressiveness and polyphonic clarity, which enrich the Lutheran tradition by combining the characteristics of the Baroque masters with highly individual organ colors and sonorities. This is the final volume of this first complete recording of Walcha's organ works.

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Helmut Walcha was one of the most influential organists of the 20th century. His Chorale Preludes stand as a testament to his enrichment of the Lutheran tradition, building on the inheritance of Baroque masters to create works of great expressive clarity and contrapuntal transparency, as well as introducing highly individual organ colors and sonorities. Volumes 1 and 2 of this four volume complete collection can be found on Naxos 8.572910 and 8.572911.

Antegnati: L'Antegnata

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Chiara Soave and Cecilia Baccolo’s Schubert interpretations have always been welcomed enthusiastically by critics and audiences. In 2010, the Duo was invited to perform a programme entirely dedicated to the great Austrian composer at the Concertgebouw Hall in Amsterdam, the only Italian piano duo to be featured in that renowned hall.

In the vast panorama of 20th-century guitar music, the works of Madrid composer Tomás Marco hold a prominent position. Born in 1942, Marco first became known as an exponent of the Spanish avant-garde in 1963 with Albayalde for solo guitar, and would return to write for that instrument in later years. 22 Tarots, Presto Mormorando and Sonata de Fuego were written between 1990 and 1996. Even though they are formally very different - a collection of short pieces, a single work, a sonata - the three works share traits that warrant their being united in this sort of short anthology.

PAGANINI: Works for Solo Violin (Complete)

Includes sonata(s) for guitar by Niccolò Paganini. Soloist: Guido Fichtner.

An enterprising and convincing set of performances; Naxos rescues another neglected composer.

I was somewhat lukewarm about Elizabeth Farr’s recording of the Bach solo harpsichord concertos (Naxos 8.572006-7), largely because I found the use of the 16' stop on her Keith Hill harpsichord obtrusive. I ended that review by fearing that there would be an even greater problem with the use of such an instrument on this Balbastre recording, since, by Hill’s own admission “no French harpsichords with 16' stops remain from [this] time.”

Since writing that review, I have read another review of the Bach which doesn’t even mention the offending stop, so, clearly, not everyone is going to be troubled by it. Paradoxically, too, though I dislike its use in Bach, where there is some historical evidence to support its use, I was less unhappy to hear it employed for Balbastre, where the evidence is non-existent. De gustibus non est disputandum.

We aren’t exactly well off for recordings of Balbastre: there seems currently to be only one other recording completely dedicated to his music, a 2-CD set of what Glossa call his ‘Salon Music’, another recital of his keyboard music by Mitzi Meyerson (fortepiano and harpsichord, GCD921803), on which much of the music, including the Marche des Marseillois et Ça-ira from Elizabeth Farr’s recording, are duplicated. Otherwise, we have just odd pieces by him on collections, especially on anthologies of that French Christmas phenomenon the instrumental Noël.

Naxos have on their website an interview with Elizabeth Farr, headed ‘My passion is my profession’, in which she speaks of her marvel at the creativity and individuality of the music of the eighteenth century. I’m not sure that I find Balbastre’s music quite as individual as that – perhaps you have to know it as thoroughly as Farr clearly does to distinguish it from that of Rameau or François Couperin – but her performances certainly make a strong case for its inventiveness and attractiveness. The interview was conducted before she set down the recent Bach recording and this of Balbastre, but her love of his music and her understanding of it are apparent from the CDs.

I queried some of Farr’s tempi on the Bach CDs: by comparison with Robert Woolley on Hyperion, some of them sound rather erratic. I wonder if I would have been as critical if I had not had Woolley’s recordings of some of those works for comparison, though I note that the reviewer who seemed untroubled by the use of 16' tone also referred to the problematic tempi.

Not having heard any rival recordings of any significant portion of Balbastre’s repertoire, I can’t make comparisons as I did with Bach. I can only say that I found the playing here much more convincing than I did before. I do just note en passant, however, that Farr’s timings seem to differ from Meyerson’s, sometimes considerably slower, sometimes faster. The brief excerpts which are all that I have been able to hear from those Glossa CDs serve as a reminder that Meyerson alternates between the fortepiano and the harpsichord, which you may find makes for more variety; equally, you may be irritated by repeated change from one instrument to the other. Also, Farr plays the pieces in the order in which they appear in print; Meyerson rearranges them.

Two CDs of this repertoire may look like a case of over-egging the pudding, but I didn’t find it so. If you like the keyboard music of Rameau and Couperin, you should find these CDs to your liking. Indeed, the concluding tracks of CD1 (trs.13-16) offer music from Rameau’s 1748 opera Pygmalion, arranged by Balbastre for the keyboard. Such arrangements, like the wind-band conflations of Mozart’s operas, served as souvenirs for those who had heard the original and as tasters for those who had not. This is some of the most dramatic music on the CDs; the tone of the Overture is particularly well caught here.

Most of the rest of the music is as benign and affable as Balbastre’s second name would imply. I don’t wish to imply, however, that it sounds derivative or banal; as the notes point out, the French harpsichord tradition is modified by the influence of Scarlatti.

The pieces from Book I of the Pièces de clavecin are character portraits. The whole book is dedicated to his pupil Mme de la Caze and her portrait opens the collection and the first of these CDs. It’s a strong piece, though with moments of tenderness, and the contrast between it and its successor on track 2, la d’Héricourt, is well brought out by Farr. Indeed, such variety as there is in the music – probably more apparent to contemporaries than to modern listeners – is well conveyed in these performances.

The last of the aristocratic portraits here is la d’Esclignac of 1787 (CD1, tr.12). The revolution two years later put paid to Balbastre’s employment as a composer of salon pieces; he was to die in poverty ten years later. The final work on the second CD (tr.16) represents his attempt to come to terms with the new régime, a set of variations of the revolutionary tunes la Marseillaise and Ça ira (we will succeed). As played here, it makes a fine conclusion to a recommendable set; I was very happy to pardon the liberty which Elizabeth Farr admits in the notes of repeating la Marseillaise at the end. Meyerson plays the piece as written, which is less dramatic, though you may think her use here of the newer instrument, the fortepiano, more appropriate for music written after the demise of the ancien régime.

The Naxos recording is a little close for my liking, but it captures the big sound of the instrument well – at times in that final Marche the bass sonorities almost sound like those of a grand piano. The documentation is informative and readable and sets the seal on a recommendable pair of CDs.

-- Brian Wilson, MusicWeb International

This recording contains four of Schubert's 12 piano sonatas that survive in fragmentary form. Notwithstanding their varied states of incompletion, the works are well worth getting to know for their harmonic daring and melodic strength. Beethoven's Appassionata, for instance, casts a strong shadow over the F minor sonata's finale, although its unpredictable modulations and thematic detours are vintage Schubert. Listeners who know the E-flat Sonata D. 568 will be fascinated to encounter this earlier, more difficult D-flat major incarnation, minus the minuet and trio Schubert added later. All three movements of the A-flat D. 557 sonata exist intact and include a delightful Allegro whose opening theme would manifest itself more fully in the familiar "little" A major D. 664 sonata.


Many attempts have been made to complete these works, yet pianist Gottlieb Wallisch performs them as they stand. (Consequently, the F minor sonata's opening Allegro suddenly trails off and vanishes at the start of the recapitulation.) As a Schubert pianist, though, Wallisch is quite complete! He plays the A-flat sonata marginally faster than Kempff and with greater brio all around, and his winged, pliable accounts of the F minor's first three movements contrast to the statuesque Richter versions. But the Russian pianist's long-lined power in the finale surpasses Wallisch's smaller-scaled note-spinning. For the most part, however, Wallisch's solid technique and sound musicianship operate on a high level and benefit from Naxos' top-notch engineering. Wallisch also provides his own excellent, informative booklet notes. Highly recommended for Schubertians of every stripe. [7/6/2004]
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Includes work(s) for piano by Bohuslav Martinu. Soloist: Giorgio Koukl.

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