In 2016 Alessandra Ammara won high praise for an album of Mendelssohn duets with her husband Roberto Prosseda. The following year her Piano Classics debut of Debussy inspired no less glowing reviews. The sequel elegantly completes her recordings of the Préludes and Images with their second volumes, coupled with the more innocent pleasures of the Suite Bergamasque. Thus the album spans Debussy’s first and penultimate published piano cycles, for while the Suite appeared in print only in 1905, it was composed back in 1890. In their titles, three of the four movements – a Prelude, Minuet and Passepied – invoke the formal elegance of a Baroque dance suite, but the elusive character and freedom of the music owes more to the poetry of Verlaine, who used the archaic ‘bergamasque’ term in his poem Clair de lune, which as the suite’s third movement became Debussy’s single greatest hit. In both the Images and Préludes, Debussy invested their second volumes with darker, gloomier tone-colors and higher contrasts with wild outbursts and even manic humor. The portraits of individual characters and landscapes are more sharply drawn, more charged with private intensity. They make accordingly greater demands upon the interpreter, nowhere more so than in the dark, wild magic of the ‘Feux d’artifice’ – Fireworks – which close out the Préludes. The three Images in Book 2 are linked by their association with the Debussy’s friend Louis Laloy, and by extension with their mutual fascination with China and the alien world of East-Asian culture. The bells in ‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’ ring from the church in Laloy’s home-town; the title of ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’ was proposed by Laloy himself, and the goldfish – ‘Poissons d’or’ of the triptych’s final panel – swim and shimmer through much Chinese lacquer artwork.

This new recording of Rachmaninoff’s early works offers a fascinating insight into the budding genius of the great Russian. A child prodigy at the piano Rachmaninoff was obviously drawn to his instrument when composing his first sketches and works. Pianistically challenging and bursting with melancholy and passion they are already vintage Rachmaninoff and form the foundation for his later masterworks. The recording contains several character pieces like a Song Without Words and a separate Prelude, the 3 Nocturnes and the recently discovered Suite in D minor, as well as the Morceaux de Salon Op. 10. Italian pianist Elisa Tomellini was schooled at the famous Imola Piano Academy, where her teachers included Franco Scala, Joaquin Achucarro and Alexander Lonquich. She followed masterclasses with Maurizio Pollini and Lazar Berman. She played in Washington Kennedy Center and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Her playing combines Italian charm and Slavic passion.

Eero Heinonen has long been a champion of the composer’s neglected output for piano. With this recording he continues to make the case for music that does not easily give up its secrets but, in the right hands, sings with Sibelius’s unique voice. Sibelius was not himself an accomplished pianist, but he wrote for the instrument – at which he composed – throughout his career, and maintained that, while often overlooked, its time would come. In recent years his prophecy has come true, especially with the Op.75 suite of five pieces which he composed in 1914 and titled ‘The Trees’. They move from a Tchaikovskian melancholy common to much of his earlier piano output, through impressionist studies of light and darkness, to the kind of sombre, dissonant harmonies in the final piece (‘The Spruce’) which call to mind orchestral masterpieces such as En Saga and Tapiola. Rather than cherry-picking from a considerable output, Eero Heinonen has chosen to present four complete opus numbers which nevertheless encapsulate the range of Sibelius’s piano writing. In the Six Impromptus Op.5 of 1890-93 he successfully integrates elements of Finnish folk music within the idiom of fantasy inherited from Schubert and Chopin. The 10 Pieces Op.24 were written between 1895 and 1903 – formative years for the composer, in which he moved away from his German-influenced training and discovered for himself a more distinctively Finnish voice, but in this context still within the genre of salon pieces. These are the works most directly comparable with Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. Then, before the Op.75 masterpieces, he wrote a trio of Sonatinas Op.67 in 1912, around the same time as the troubled Fourth Symphony. The first of them, as played here by Eero Heinonen, shares some of the symphony’s austere idiom and introvert nature.

SCHUMANN Davidsbündlertänze. Papillons. Arabesque • Denys Proshayev (pn) • PIANO 0057 (59:20)


Davidsbündlertänze represents the high point of inspiration among Schumann’s sets of short piano pieces, as Dichterliebe does among his song cycles. The wit, variety, technical innovation, melodic inspiration, and artful, sometimes jolting segués between pieces (or songs) in both works make them Schumann’s finest collections.


While Davidsbündlertänze may sound randomly kaleidoscopic, it’s actually purposefully structured, as 12 dances are balanced by six pieces of either lyrical or stormy character. Davidsbündler’s 18 pieces, like Dichterliebe’s 16 songs, cohere as a cycle and neither work can be successfully excerpted.


The Belarus-born pianist Denys Proshayev is a sympathetic guide to Davidsbündlertänze ’s structure, slightly downplaying the speed and extroversion of a few of the pieces (nos. 9 and 10), and lavishing the longest, most introverted movement, no 7, with his most tender touch and patient pacing. It, and the other “Eusebian” pieces, become the emotional focus of the cycle. Throughout, he plays with a real sense of caprice, employing a daring amount of rubato that either feels convincing (no. 1) or tugs at the music too much (no. 4). Proshayev clearly has a top-level technique, though it’s not on display, but employed at the service of his total identification with Schumann’s music.


His performance of Papillon s is full of energy, giddy and impulsive compared to Wilhelm Kempff’s straighter pacing in the last performance of the work that I reviewed. Both performances communicate affection and a dance feeling, though Proshayev is the showier dancer. This easily recommendable Schumann disc ends with the ubiquitous Arabesque in a beautiful, calm reading. Piano Classics’ sound is good, on the bright side.


FANFARE: Paul Orgel

The strident conviction of Goffredo Petrassi (1904-2003) his seven postwar Concertos for Orchestra could hardly be anticipated from the fluent pastiche of his piano Partita, composed in 1926. The Baroque titles of the four movements introduce a disarming simplicity of expression, whose dominant strains are the Classicism of Mozart and Beethoven. Even the more exploratory harmonies of the Toccata (1933) are couched in an idiom of gentle introspection – a far cry from the contemporary toccatas of Bartok and Prokofiev, for example – and an escapist, playful spirit courses through the seven Inventions of 1944. Extant surveys of Petrassi’s piano music end there, whereas Andrea Molteni adds three further, attractive miniatures: a mischievous Petit Piece of 1950 and then the two movements of Oh Les Beaux Jours! (1976), which rework material from the early 1940s including an unfinished Divertimento Scarlattiano. Unexpected this may be, for all but the most devoted student of Petrassi, but Andrea Molteni brings out the most attractive and witty features of his piano writing.

Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975) was, if anything, an even keener student of Baroque music than Petrassi, and blessed with a more subversive wit: in one of his most famous works, the Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera (1951-2) he fashions a dodecaphonic sequence on Bach’s name (B.A.C.H). Twelve-tone counterpoint should be a contradiction in terms, but that would underestimate Dallapiccola’s powers of technique and invention, which create a genuine homage in the spirit of his own time. Before that, Andrea Molteni presents two further works in a haunting neoclassical vein: a ‘Canonic Sonata’ based on Paganini’s Capricci for solo violin, and a set of three ‘Episodes’ drawn from his ballet Marsia, by turns anguished and serene in mood.

REVIEW:

Petrassi and Dallapiccola were born the same year. Their earliest piano works reflect past styles and history. Petrassi’s four-movement Partita is crackling Neoclassical and the bittersweet Toccata is a theme and variations. Dallapiccola’s Sonatina Canonica leverages material from Paganini’s violin caprices. Both composers gravitated towards lean styles: Petrassi’s Invenzioni demonstrate atonal counterpoint whereas Dallapiccola jumped wholeheartedly into serialism as evidenced by the excerpts from the ballet, Marsia. The pair of short pieces in Petrassi’s Oh Les Beaux Jours! is playful and spontaneous, hinting at earlier efforts. Rarely heard, the 11-part Quaderno offers crafted miniatures reflecting serialism and canons.

-- La Folia

Carl Stenhammar (1871-1927) trained as a pianist, and Brahms’s epic D minor Concerto held no fears for him. His writing for the instrument is accordingly bold and heroic from the outset, as his G minor Sonata from 1890 demonstrates. Held together by Wagnerian leitmotifs but often drawn into Schumannesque dreaming, the four-movement Sonata wears Austro-German passion on its sleeve, and Brahms continued to be a clear influence on Stenhammar’s piano writing in the three Fantasies Op.11 from 1895, but the harmonies are now clearer and more limpid, in the manner of Chopin but also singing with a more native Swedish or at least Nordic accent. Still more Franco-Russian in idiom are the Three Small Pieces from the same year, in the spirit of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces and Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, each distilling Stenhammar’s individual melodic style within a minute or two. The high point of his solo piano output – as distinct from the mighty Second Piano Concerto which has found a place on the fringes of the Romantic repertoire – is reached with the Late Summer Nights Op.33, a five-movement cycle of concise tone-pictures which ventures into speculative harmonic realms like Fauré’s late Nocturnes, demanding the most refined of responses from the pianist. The Italian pianist Paolo Scafarella is fast becoming a Stenhammar specialist. He has been engaged to record the concertos with the Orchestra Filarmonica Campana in Pagani, near Naples, and he performs in the major halls of his native country. This release marks his debut on Piano Classics.

While most listeners to 20th-century music and piano masterpieces will have recordings of Messiaen’s two major cycles in their collection, the rest of his piano music often tends to fly under the radar. Yet Messiaen wrote piano music throughout his life, and among his most characteristic early works is the set of eight Preludes, with their playful evocations of wind and air and dreams and light. The piano writing may owe much to Debussy’s example, but it’s clear that the 20-year-old composer was already well on its way to developing unique aspects of his language: the blue harmonies, the repetitions and the patient ascensions towards a state of ecstasy that make him among the most imitated of last century’s composers. From the middle period of Messiaen’s protean career, the Quatre études de rythme exercised lasting influence over the most brilliant composers of the avant-garde generation including Boulez and Stockhausen, though their application of the principles of ‘total serialism’ is much less dry and more vivid than countless later imitators. Ciro Longobardi’s album concludes with perhaps the composer’s single most technically challenging piano work, La fauvette des jardins. This half-hour portrait of the reed-warbler stands as an appendix to the Catalogue d’oiseaux, rarely encountered but a feat of coruscating virtuosity to set alongside the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt and the studies of Alkan and Godowsky. The Italian pianist Ciro Longobardi proved his mettle in Messiaen with a glowingly received album of the Catalogue d’oiseaux for Piano

Chiara Cipelli made a notable debut on Brilliant Classics in 2019 with the little-known music of Bruno Bettinelli. Now she turns her attention to the early works of Olivier Messiaen which are contemporary with much of Bettinelli’s piano music. Dating from 1929, the cycle of Eight Preludes finds Messiaen at his most impressionistic, with an opening, entrancing evocation of a dove that perhaps owes more to the spare language of Ravel in the ‘Oiseaux tristes’ of Miroirs than it does to his own, later and more extrovert transcriptions of birdsong. These Preludes strike a prevailing mood of reflection and calm, tending towards a French but uncharacteristic melancholy. Already in the second Prelude the 21-year-old Messiaen is trying out the effect of a visionary, aspiring melody over the top of a solemn chorale – the master organ improviser at a very early stage of development. The rarely encountered Pièce pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas strikes an even more sombre note, as a piece written by Messiaen in memory of his much-loved teacher of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. Here is a superb example of Messiaen’s chorale style, at once ecstatic and severe, at its most imposing and yet compressed (lasting only four minutes). Thereafter, Chiara Cipelli’s album strikes a more extrovert note, with the Fantaisie Burlesque of 1932 and a pair of the Quatre Etudes de Rythme with which the composer revolutionized his own language in the early 1950s and prefigured much avant-garde music by his pupils such as Boulez and Stockhausen, In the two Ile de feu studies, every aspect of composition is systematized according to a pre-arranged plan – not only notes in the 12-tone method devised by Schoenberg, but rhythms and even durations. Yet the results are much too stark and fiery to be confused with anyone but Messiaen. Chiara Cipelli ends her recital with a genuine rarity, the standalone Prelude which Messiaen wrote in 1964 but withheld, so that it only saw the light of day in 2000, eight years after his death.

This well filled CD (79 minutes) contain the complete transcriptions for piano that Rachmaninoff made of compositions of various composers. Being a celebrated pianist and a genius composer, Rachmaninoff didn’t literally transcribe, but added his own unique pianistic and compositional features to them, creating as much his own masterwork as is the original. Ranging from Bach (3 movements from the Violin Partita in E), through transcriptions of his own and Tachikovsky’s songs, Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream of hair-raising difficulty, he ends with fashionable transcriptions of Kreisler’s Liebesleid and Liebesfreud, a pianistic tour de force and favourite encore.

As a substantial bonus Alexander Ghindin plays the complete Moments Musicaux Op. 16. Ghindin, one of Russia’s foremost young pianists, has the true Rachmaninoff feeling, a mix of melancholy and grandeur, playing with stunning virtuosity and panache. Alexander Korsantia, born in 1965 in Tiblisi, Georgia, won first prize at the prestigious Arthur Rubinstein Competition in 1995. He has an active international concert career, and is based in Boston, USA.

Born in 1994, the British pianist Tyler Hay is a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music where he continues his studies with the eminent piano pedagogue Niel Immermann. He already has an impressive concert diary of recitals and concertos throughout the UK and beyond: this is his debut recital, concentrating on a composer for whom he feels a particular affinity. Indeed his advocacy of Liszt has been recognised in the Liszt Society Competition in November 2016, when he won first prize. Tyler Hay’s Liszt recital ranges over the composer’s protean output. It opens with the Gothic splendour and intricate counterpoint of the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H but immediately continues in the much more intimate and elusive idiom of the first of the Valses oubliées, which are dispersed like hidden treasure throughout the album. Composed between 1881 and 1885, the Valses are fully representative examples of a ‘late style’ in Liszt, reflective mood-paintings that shift between pensiveness, resignation, and reverie. More extrovert works are interleaved with them. Tyler Hay plays Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, the shimmering masterpiece of tone-color from the second book of the Années de pèlerinage. There is also the pianistic thunder and lightning of the First Mephisto Waltz, and the D flat major First Ballade, before a return to Gothic grandeur and Bach with the Variations on ‘Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen’. Tyler Hay closes this assured debut recital, appropriately enough, with a farewell: the Abschied which is a setting of a Russian folksong supplied to Liszt by his pupil Alexander Siloti: a model of quiet simplicity and one of the composer’s most touching miniatures.

Vincent Larderet is a Steinway Artist who has given solo recitals at many of the world’s premier piano festivals and concert halls. The present release marks his debut on Piano Classics. His previous albums have explored the hot-house world of Impressionism and late Romanticism, making the intoxicating world of late Liszt a natural progression. Pieces on the edge of silence and tonality such as Nuages gris and Unstern! demand at least as much refined nuance of touch and color as the major cycles of Debussy and Ravel which Larderet has often performed in public. In his own booklet introduction, the pianist explains that the aim of the album is to capture the unrivalled rainbow of emotions that span Liszt’s protean oeuvre for the piano. His genius in creating the genre of programme music, almost from scratch (with help from Beethoven and Berlioz), is celebrated by the inclusion of the Dante Sonata of 1849, which condenses and transfigures the narrative arc of the entire Divine Comedy within a single 17-minute span. From four years later, the Second Ballade tells a Gothic tale of a night-ride, perhaps also the ancient Greek myth of Hero and Leander in which the hero drowns while attempting to swim across the Hellespont to visit his beloved, with the pianist called upon literally to produce wave upon wave of sound from his instrument in a masterpiece of tone-painting. The Funerailles anticipate the stern and enigmatic utterances of his very late period, condensing his rich harmonies and multi-layered voices to leave an ever-more imposing musical canvas which imbues each single note with significance and the overwhelming presence of mortality. The ‘sleepless’ vision of Schlaflos! Seems to come from another world; Larderet concludes his unique love-letter to Liszt with En rêve, which paints a more consoling dreamscape.

For his debut on Piano Classics, the Dutch pianist Tobias Borsboom presents a unique new recording sure to attract the attention of pianophiles everywhere: the five-movement, hour-long tone-poem which Vítezslav Novák (1870-1949) composed in 1910. The work is marginally better known through the orchestration made by the composer two years later, but the great breadth, melodic richness and sumptuous harmonies of Pan still await discovery by all but the most devoted follower of Slavonic byways. Novak composed the work at the height of his powers. IT presents a pantheistic, spiritual autobiography in music, responding to the idea of the Greek god, and the myths associated with him, through highly colourful, evocative music. The forest stirs and murmurs in a manner reminiscent of Dvorak, but the sea also swells with Debussyan waves of sonority and there are hints of Janacek in the cycle’s brooding second movement, ‘The Mountains’, which inhabits the mood of Novak’s more concise orchestral masterpiece, In the Tatras Mountains. As Tobias Borsboom observes in his invaluable booklet essay, the cycle emulates Smetana’s Ma Vlast in pursuing a cyclical unity through the return of themes and leitmotifs. Thus the opening ‘Pan’ theme lends a universal, shaping power to the entire work. A glorious C major apotheosis – on the scale of Scriabin, Schoenberg and Strauss in their contemporary works – brings the finale, ‘Woman’ to a transcendent climax.

The Catalogue d’Oiseaux of Olivier Messiaen forms an extraordinary and varied tribute to the landscape and bird-life of France, and to its composer’s powers of invention as he explored and developed innovations in harmony, melody and rhythm at a time when all the elements of music were in flux and up for grabs. The 13 compositions of the Catalogue are very different from one other, in length, form and intent. L’alouette lulu is a kind of antiphonal poem. La chouette hulotte boldly maps out territory for experimentation. Le chocard des alpes and Le buse variable are mostly articulated by shouts, where we are close to noise. The material is often raw and dissonant, but Messiaen often uses what are traditionally blocks of dissonance to create consonance. There are pieces full of melody – Le loriot or La bouscarle – and songs rich in timbre but not saturated with color like La merle de roche. He liked to convey the impression that he composed music in isolation from the world around him, inspired first and foremost by God and by the birds whom he called God’s musicians. The Italian pianist Ciro Longobardi has made a specialty of 20th and 21st-century music. He won a major piano prize at the crucible of European modernism in music, Darmstadt – only the second Italian pianist to do so – and he has given Italian premieres of significant works by the likes of Ives, Kurtág and Xenakis. With both an assured technique and a sympathetic grasp of the idioms of the great music of our own time, he is well placed to make an outstanding contribution to the rich history of the Catalogue d’Oiseaux on record.

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REVIEW:

Throughout the cycle Messiaen produces richly intricate music that should be listened to actively – do something else whilst you listen, and you miss out on aspects of the music. This is where Ciro Longobardi does well, his performance makes you listen, through its diverse use of dynamics and the expert use of silences. His playing is concise and bright and is best listened to with the accompanying booklet, in which his notes on the music expertly set the scene. It is a long time since I listened to Yvonne Loriod’s recording of the Catalogue d’Oiseaux, so I cannot make a comparison with the premiere artist. However, in comparison with the recording of Anatol Ugorski for DG (474 3452), this somewhat quicker interpretation stands up well, with Ugorski sounding a little too relaxed now, especially when compared with the wonderful performance of Pierre-Laurent Aimard (PTC5186670). For me personally, Aimard would be my preferred recording, he has the knack of sounding relaxed even when the music is not, but this new performance from Longobardi is not far behind, he is confident in the more challenging parts whilst as already stated his use of dynamics in the slower, quieter passages, as well as his adherence to the silences is excellent. The recorded piano sound is very good, whilst the booklet notes set the scene well, making this a worthy alternative to the Pierre-Laurent Aimard recording.

– MusicWeb International

Franz Liszt (1811-1886), indefatigable pianist, conductor and composer, was one of the first romantic composers to recognize the genius of Franz Schubert. Apart from his numerous piano transcriptions of Schubert’s songs he arranged 34 waltzes, written by Schubert to entertain his audience, into a series of 9 “Soirées de Vienne”, elaborate compositions written in Liszt’s inimitable pianistic idiom, refined, perceptive and utterly charming.

Alberto Ferro (born 1996) is one of the most remarkable talents of today. He achieved his Master's degree under the guidance of Prof. Epifanio Comis, his lifetime mentor, at the "Vincenzo Bellini" Institute of Music in Catania (2018). He also attended several piano masterclasses held by very important pianists such as Michel Beroff, Dina Yoffe, Leslie Howard, Elisso Virsaladze, Joaquin Achúcarro, Richard Goode, Jörg Demus and Vladimir Ashkenazy. He won the 2017 Beethoven Competition in Bonn and took top prizes at the Busoni Competition as well as the Premio Venezia. His recent CD with the Etudes-Tableaux by Rachmaninoff received 5-star reviews in the international press.

Having completed his studies at the Brussels conservatoire and won first prizes at several distinguished competitions for young musicians, Matthieu Idmtal quickly became known as a specialist in the music of Alexander Scriabin. His debut on record was dedicated to a sequence of the Russian composer’s Etudes and Preludes, and it won him golden reviews. His Scriabin album was followed by an equally well-received album of the violin sonatas by Edvard Grieg, in company with his regular violin-recital partner Maya Levy. The natural sequel is this focus on the Norwegian composer’s solo output. Grieg composed seven books of Lyric Pieces across the course of his career: songs without words that amount to a diary of his compositional evolution as well as testament to enduring preoccupations such as the artistic transformation of folksong and the evocation of natural phenomena such as sunlight and the movement of water. Idmtal’s sequence ranges across all seven books, and does not shy away from established classics such as the Arietta and Wedding Day at Troldhaugen. However, he also includes several lesser-known and introspective masterpieces such as the Vanished Days and Homesickness from the Opus 57 set. Even by their side, however, the Piano Sonata Op 7 is an almost forgotten masterpiece. Grieg wrote it at the age of 22, recently graduated from the conservatoire in Leipzig, yet even within the first movement’s opening exposition there are shapes and harmonies that instantly identify the composer’s artistic fingerprint. The sonata reflects the ambitions and character of the young Grieg: high-spirited, virtuosic, impetuous, and permeated with brusque mood swings. Cast in a compressed version of the traditional four-movement form, it encompasses many changes of mood, sometimes very abrupt, as if the composer was overflowing with musical ideas and inspiration.