Dupont: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 2

As stringent a critic of his fellow composers as he was of himself, Mendelssohn wrote in unusually effusive terms about the Etudes Op. 70 when Moscheles sent them to him in 1829. ‘Your splendid Etudes are the best pieces of music that I have heard for a long time, as instructive and useful for the musician as they are gratifying for the listener. Might you be prepared to publish a third volume? You would be rendering a service to all music lovers.’ The Op. 70 Etudes have attracted previous recordings, complete and in part, but they are presented here for the first time on instruments of the composer’s time – an 1844 Erard and a modern copy of an 1819 Graf model – thus releasing and intensifying the color and playfulness of works which transcend their didactic origins. Some of technical and tonal innovations in these studies represented a creative stimulus for composers including Schumann, Liszt and Chopin. Schumann dedicated his ambitious Sonata Op. 14 to Moscheles, and believed that the Op. 70 Etudes made his friend one of the greatest composers of piano music of the age. Surely the greatest piano teacher of his age – perhaps the greatest ever – Chopin religiously used the Op. 70 Etudes for instruction as a kind of New Testament to set alongside Bach and Beethoven. Moreover, they clearly made a considerable impact on his own Etudes, Op. 10 and Op. 25. No. 23 of Moscheles’s set is the only explicitly programmatic one, cast as ‘a battle among demons’, but there is no shortage of immediate drama and theatre throughout the set, especially in the hands of Michele Bolla.

Recipient of a 10/10 rating by Gramophone!

The touch and musicianship of the Hungarian pianist Klára Würtz is amply attested by a substantial catalogue of Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics albums stretching from Mozart to Bartók. Her latest recording turns to a pillar of the keyboard repertoire, the variation set composed by J.S. Bach in 1741 as the fourth and final volume of his compendious Clavier-Übung (Keyboard exercise) project.

Practical instruction, entertainment and profound expression went hand in hand for Bach: one artistic goal never obscured the others. However, few of his works attain all three goals with the sublime mastery of the Goldberg Variations. The prowess of the performer is tested and placed on show as much as the ingenuity of the creative imagination in Bach’s most comprehensive response to the variation genre. ‘Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits’: the composer’s dedication and introduction makes the artistic intent of the Goldberg Variations plain. Every third variation in the series of 30 is a canon, following an ascending pattern. The variations that intervene between the canons are also arranged in a pattern, following an order of canon, genre piece (such as a minuet or gigue) and a more freely developed and ornate fantasia. The whole set is bookended by an aria in the style of a sarabande which already presents the theme in decorated form as a grave chaconne. The poised classicism of Klára Würtz’s pianism makes this new recording of the Goldbergs an album to be keenly anticipated by all pianophiles and lovers of Bach. She takes all the repeats, and plays with the full armory of the modern piano’s tonal capabilities.

 

This new album presents a delightful selection of Poulenc’s piano music, starting with the intriguing little Valse (1919) from L’Album des Six, which first presented in published form the collective of Franco-Swiss composers who came to be known under that title. As the fruit of a trip to Italy in the company of Darius Milhaud, a fellow Les Six-er, Napoli is a suite written in 1925 and presenting Italian forms through the light of Poulenc’s irrepressible personality.
More affecting are the eight Nocturnes, composed between 1929 and 1938, and the three Novelettes (1927-1959), while the ’Six petites pièces enfantines’ that make up the Villageoises of 1933 share the a spirit of gentle playfulness with Poulenc’s popular musical tale, Babar the Elephant. One day when Poulenc was improvising on the piano, his cousin’s little girl exclaimed: “Grandfather, it’s so boring when you play like that, why don’t you play us this?”. And in 1945, once the dreadful war years were over, Poulenc was happy to oblige.
The Trois Mouvements perpetuels are early pieces, a product of the kaleidoscopic ‘harlequin years’ of Paris in the 1920s. The three movements reveal a musical freshness and fluidity somewhat reminiscent of Satie, whose individualistic approach to life and art inspired the members of Les Six, to whom he served as a kind of honorary president. Finally, Poulenc evokes the spirit of Bach returns in a surprising guise in the Valse-Improvisation sur le nom de Bach, a piece bursting with vitality, in perfect keeping with the famous pianist Vladimir Horowitz, to whom it was dedicated.
Two previous albums by Chiara Cipelli on Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics have won enthusiastic praise from reviewers in Fanfare magazine. The piano music of Bruno Bettinelli is ‘presented with wonderful vigour and colour by the fine young Lombardy native Chiara Cipelli’ (95801), while ‘Cipelli’s technical capabilities are impressive throughout’ her selection of early Messiaen pieces (PCL10200).

Piano Classics presents the first volume in a major new series which promises to become the most comprehensive recorded survey of a central but now little-known figure in 19th-century Italian music. Born in Rome in 1841, Giovanni Sgambati cut an impressive but relatively familiar figure as a prodigious young virtuoso until, as a 21-year-old keyboard lion in the making, he was introduced to Franz Liszt. The encounter changed Sgambati’s life. Liszt, perhaps the single most influential figure in European musical life in the middle of the 19th century, took the young Sgambati under his wing, and his faith was richly repaid. Still in his 20s, Sgambati conducted the Italian premiere of the Dante Symphony and even the premiere of the first (lengthy) part of the Christus oratorio. There is an irony that the single piece through which his name has travelled worldwide is a piano Melodie, a sensuously achieved transcription of the Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. Guaranteed to hush a rapturous audience into silence, it became the much-loved encore piece for the late Nelson Freire, among others. Too little of Sgambati’s music for his own instrument is known beyond the Melodie. This neglect is being redressed in style by the Italian pianist Gaia Federica Caporiccio, born in Florence in 1988.

The first volume of a projected complete series of Sgambati’s piano works proceeds in mostly chronological fashion. Thus the curtain is drawn back with a flourish in the Gothic, Bachian arpeggios of the Prelude and Fugue Op.6.

Felix Blumenfeld (1863-1931) was a virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher whose class comprised the likes of Simon Barere, Maria Grinberg and Vladimir Horowitz. But he was also a composer of an oeuvre of breathtaking beauty, originality and sophistication. Even in his mid 20s Blumenfeld began teaching at the St Petersburg Conservatoire but resigned in protest at Rimsky-Korsakov’s dismissal following the senior composer’s support of the protestors killed in the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905. At length he returned to his post but left for Kyiv on the outbreak of the Russian revolution, and became rector of the conservatoire founded by Mykola Lysenko (where he taught Horowitz). Chopin, Wagner, and other Romantic-era masters all make their presence felt in the surging melodies and passionate harmonies of Blumenfeld’s own music.

Published in 1892 by Belaieff and dedicated to Rimsky-Korsakov’s wife, the Op.17 form a quintessential work of Slavic late Romanticism. They are structured in four books of six preludes, touched with the solemnity of Orthodox chant at points and often aspiring to a grand and tragic idiom despite their relative brevity and tending towards melancholy even in the major-key pieces. The Op.17 Preludes are complemented in this new recording by Blumenfeld’s study for the left hand Op.36 – relatively familiar as an example of the technique and widely promoted by the likes of Godowsky and Lewenthal. The Op.24 Etude de Concert is a dazzling accumulation of piano sonority requiring the deftest of hands and care over voicing to bring its towering chords to life.

Three vividly picturesque piano suites, evoking the colours and rhythms of Spanish life, in a new recording by a native artist trained within the long and distinguished Spanish piano tradition. Pedro Piquero trained with the Spanish pianist Esteban Sanchez, who had himself studied with Alfred Cortot before returning to his native Spain to pass on his insights into the kind of repertoire recorded here. Brilliant Classics issued a box of Sanchez's recordings of Albeniz, and this new recording of Turina's music by his former student forms a fitting sequel. The piano lay at the centre of Turina's life and work, as it did for his near contemporary Maurice Ravel. The piano became the expressive complement to the other instrument that accompanied Turina for most of his life: the camera. An amateur photographer, with an impeccable eye, he captured "objective" images with his camera and then "subjectivised" them in his music. Seville, his native city, was always with him, whether in presence or in essence, and was his most frequent source of inspiration, starting with his second published work. This 'painterly suite' in three movements takes extended snapshots of an orange grove; a prayerful night-vigil shortly before the Easter festivities; and then the celebrations of the Easter fair itself. Writing the suite in Paris in 1908, Turina describes in Debussyan style not so much the picturesque details of his chosen scenes, but the way he remembers them from far away. Expression reigns over illustration. In just the same way, the opening 'Exaltacion' of the Danzas fantasticas, encapsulates his relationship with Spanish folk music: evocation, rather than quotation or re-creation. After the atmospheric introduction, Turina conjures the jota, but his own version of the dance - as is also true of the seguidilla in the central section. This Op.22 set of dances, composed in 1919, became best known in Turina's later orchestration, but a pianist as capable as Pedro Piquero can evoke a palette of orchestral colours on the piano. One Spanish musicologist has described the Cinco danzas gitanas, composed in 1929, as 'unquestionably one of [Turina's] pianistic masterpieces.'

Described by International Piano as ‘one of the most gifted pianists of his generation’, Mark Viner is steadily gaining a reputation as one of Britain’s leading concert pianists; his unique blend of individual artistry combined with his bold exploration of the byways of the piano literature garnering international renown. Having set down dazzling accounts of the knuckle-breaking studies and solo Concerto, Mark Viner here shows his ability to distil the spirit of Alkan’s more intimate and spiritual works.

Alkan was a serious scholar of Jewish learning and ancient biblical texts, a preoccupation, not a pastime, that took precedence for him over music and the piano. The atmosphere and design of this Op.72 cycle (completed in 1867) harkens back to the grave passion instilled in the earlier 25 Préludes Op.31 (1847 - PCL10189). Several of the pieces venture beyond evocations of devotion to present psychologically probing dialogues of conflict and reconciliation. From the Revivalist sturdiness of the cycle’s opening number through the inward contemplation of No.2 to the austere fugue of No.3 and beyond, Alkan continues to spring surprises on the listener, including sudden harmonic clashes which abruptly break the tonal fabric and anticipate 20th-century trends of modernism. To the Op.72 cycle, Mark Viner adds a rarely heard Etude which Alkan originally composed for a pianistic encyclopedia compiled by his former professor. He concludes with the Etude Alla-Barbaro which was rediscovered as recently as 1996.

A new recording of all the major works for piano by a foundational figure in French music of the early 20th century. Born in 1865, Dukas could have (and probably did) compose a good deal literally and stylistically in the 19th century, but his fastidious craftsmanship and self-criticism saw him burn far more music than he allowed to survive. All of a sudden, on the turn of the new century, he wrote two large-scale works which bring together a reverence for the recent and long-gone past with bold new thinking of how to write for the piano. Begun in 1899, the Variations take an innocent dance theme by Rameau and subject it to a dazzling sequence of treatments coloured by strict counterpoint, dreamy rhapsody and a Lisztian scale of piano writing. Even more ambitious and contrapuntal in its workings is the 40-minute Piano Sonata which has long been regarded as a summit of fin-de-siècle piano writing. The Sonata has often been compared to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata for its colossal dimensions, its structural complexities and its tightrope virtuoso writing. Dukas himself later discussed its journey in terms of a symbolic victory over ‘the beast within’, and ‘the triumph of Apollo over the Pythian serpent’. Vincenzo Maltempo follows in the footsteps of virtuosos such as Michel Ponti and Marc-André Hamelin, and shows himself equipped for the task, having already accumulated a critically acclaimed catalogue of hyper-virtuoso repertoire on Piano Classics, including five albums of Alkan, the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt and the complete Sonatas of Scriabin. He possesses the virtuosity to burn which this music demands, but also the poetic sensibility to bring the most subtle nuances of colour to bear on two miniatures from much later in Dukas’s career, a Prélude in memory of Haydn and a deeply felt tribute to the memory of Debussy which makes haunting reference to the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.

The two early concertos of Chopin are repertoire works, deservedly so, for their prodigious synthesis of virtuoso finesse and lyricism. However, the composer’s music for piano and orchestra does not stop there: he produced a quartet of standalone concertante pieces, each on the scale of his concerto first movements, which once were recorded as fill-ups to the concertos but have been neglected in recent years. The Russian pianist Ekaterina Litvintseva redresses this neglect with a beautifully polished new album of all four pieces, for which she receives warmly idiomatic support from the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Pardubice, on an intimate scale which the composer would have recognized (and preferred).

Chopin wrote his variations of Mozart’s ‘La ci darem’ as a prodigally talented teenager, a composition exercise for his teacher back in Warsaw. While cast in the popular style of its time – a grand introduction for a popular operatic melody, elaborated with pianistic sleights of hand for maximum effect, and a rousing finale – the piece is inspired with moments of originality that elevate it above contemporary comparison pieces. The Fantasy on Polish Airs and the Krakowiak soon followed, as Chopin was becoming celebrated across Europe as a new star of that new instrument, the piano. The themes in the Krakowiak are Chopin’s own,but their character is designedly Polish – mystic in the Romantic, piano-and-horn-led introduction, then sparkling with gaiety in the main Allegro. The same kind of formal balance is developed in the Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise Op. 22: it opens with the kind of ethereal melody which would soon become known as inimitably characteristic of Chopin, the dreamer of the piano, preeminent master of his art in the generation after Beethoven at translating a poetic consciousness and private thoughts into the domain of music.

Vincenzo Maltempo's considerable catalogue of recordings for Piano Classics includes a much-admired set of the two concertos by Brahms. According to Fanfare, 'Maltempo... plays with commanding technique, grand gestural sweep throughout, and real tonal bloom.' For this second volume of the composer's solo output for the piano, Maltempo has devised a compelling journey for the listener, from the noble and often heroic profile of the Ballades Op. 10 to the late and distilled collections Opp. 116-119, taking in en route the Variations on an Original Theme Op. 21 No. 1 and the eight Klavierst�cke Op. 76. In his performances, Maltempo brings out this stylistic evolution of both piano-writing and harmony, enabling us to appreciate for ourselves the degree to which Brahms continually challenged himself to enrich and experiment with his style, as well as ruthlessly exercising on himself the red pen and the sharp ear which made him so shrewd a critic of fellow composers. The scholar Denis Matthews identified three phases, or styles, in Brahms, not necessarily equating to the conventional division of early, middle, and late: the architectural, contrapuntal, and lyrical. On the surface, beyond a more intense chromaticism and openness to dissonance, there is relatively little to separate the Ballades from the late works. Much the least-often heard piece in this collection is the Variations Op. 21, and the teasing ingenuity of Brahms's treatment of his theme - initially quiet and introspective - is based on a rigorous exploration of contrapuntal possibilities. The Variations date from a period immediately after his fateful meeting with Robert and Clara Schumann in Dusseldorf, when he found himself stretched to live up to the Schumanns' extravagant praise of him as the pre-eminent successor to Beethoven. They and others were captivated by the composer's own mastery of his instrument as a performer, too, and the Op. 21 Variations show Brahms moving on from the extrovert keyboard lionism of works such as the First Concerto while still using the variation principle to celebrate virtuosity as both a composer and a pianist.

This valuable revival of the piano music by Cesar Cui began with a 2CD volume played by Marco Rapetti (PCL10211), surveying the composer's early output from 1877 to 1888. Born in what is now Vilnius, capital of modern-day Lithuania, Cui began to learn the piano as a child, initially from his elder sister. His first and last compositions were written for the piano, and he produced 29 opus numbers for the instrument (the total opus catalogue reaches 106). The Australian pianist Paul Rickard-Ford now moves the project on with a chronological survey from the Quatre Morceaux Op. 22 of 1883 to the Theme and Variations Op. 61, from 1901. Dedicated respectively to Theodore Leschitzky and to Josef Hofmann, these pieces show how admired Cui was in his day, even if he is now generally treated as the forgotten member of the 'Mighty Handful' group of Russian composers. One of Liszt's final works was a piano transcription of Cui's orchestral Tarantelle Op. 12. Other collections on the album are dedicated to Anton Rubinstein (the two Polonaises Op. 30) and to Hans von B�low (three Impromptus Op. 35), as well as a charming pair of Bluettes Op. 29 dedicated to the Countess de Mercy-Argenteau, who was Cui's generous patron and indefatigable supporter outside Russia. Many of the pieces here are receiving their world-premiere recordings, such as the four pieces composed in 1900-01 and collected as Op. 60. They include a Polka, a Novelette, a Mazurka, and a Polonaise: all familiar genres, which Cui inflected with his individual brand of Russian-accented lyricism, ultimately drawing on an early-Romantic lexicon of expression formulated by Chopin and Schumann. Thus all the music here belongs to the salon, designed first and foremost to charm and to entertain. Paul Rickard-Ford has been on the staff of the Sydney Conservatorium for more than thirty years and was Chair of the Piano Unit from 2006 to 2016. His discography includes the Ann�es de p�lerinage of Liszt, as well as recitals of Chopin and Schumann.

An illuminating juxtaposition of keyboard giants bookending the Romantic age, by a pianist with a growing international reputation. The Latvian pianist Georgijs Osokins made these recordings for Piano Classics between 2016 and 2018, and they attracted an enthusiastic critical response on their first issue. In Gramophone, Jeremy Nicholas welcomed a 'powerful and cleanly articulated reading' of Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Chopin, while the paired transcriptions 'provide further evidence of Osokins's stylistic identification with Rachmaninoff's idiom.' The Chopin album was made shortly after Osokins placed himself among the medal winners at the 2015 Chopin competition in Warsaw, where he divided opinion with interpretations which many found radical. Yet the coherence of his thinking is powerfully evident from the sequence which charts the 'late' thinking and keyboard writing of Chopin, as it ventures into poetic territories hitherto unexplored even by him, from the Third Piano Sonata through to the visionary Polonaise-Fantaisie. These are works that will perennially challenge and reward the most adventurous minds and musicians in any generation, and with this album Osokins placed himself among their number. In the following decade, Osokins has gone on to win first prize at the 2018 Manhattan International Music Competition in New York, and make an acclaimed debut at the Salzburg Festival, as well as several other recordings. He has also become the youngest-ever recipient of the Latvian Grand Music Award, the highest honour in the Latvian music industry. Such awards are recognition of the artistry which illuminates this album: a piercing musicianship which places itself at the service of the composer.

While Rodolfo Ritter's repertoire encompasses many well-known and unfamiliar composers, he has made a speciality of Ponce's piano music. He recorded the two piano concertos (for Sterling) in 2013, as well as several solo pieces. Now, for Piano Classics, he embarks on a new adventure, which should win new friends everywhere for an idiom full of charm and optimism, essentially Romantic in spirit and piquantly coloured by the composer's Mexican heritage. A social and cultural revolution followed on the heels of Mexico's political revolution of 1910-1917, as a once largely rural nation became, within a matter of years, predominantly urban. Born in 1882, Manuel Ponce in some ways embodied the outward-facing spirit of that revolution, as the country's first internationally renowned composer of European-style art music ('classical'), and yet in the nostalgia-soaked language of that music evoked a romanticized past. This is the tension explored by Rodolfo Ritter as he begins a multi-volume journey through Ponce's piano output - only the second pianist to do so on record. Ponce was something of a child prodigy, already accomplished and cultivated as both a pianist and composer before he entered the national conservatoire in 1901. Take the dance for the left hand titled Malgre tout, which Ponce was inspired to write in 1900 as a homage to the sculpture of the same name by Jes�s F. Contreras - a resonant depiction of a chained and defenceless woman who, "despite everything", looks up with hope (not so oblique as a politically charged metaphor). Earlier still is the bel-canto style lyricism of the Misterio doloroso (1899). Another pivotal work for the left hand dates from a full quarter-century later, the Prelude and Fugue which Ponce wrote in Paris while under the tutelage of Paul Dukas. No less schooled by an earlier period of study in Europe, as a pupil of Martin Krause in Berlin, comes the Variations on a Theme by Handel (1906). In the interim, Ponce channelled this classical technique through the melodies and rhythms of his home country in pieces such as the Rapsodia Mexicana No. 1 of 1911. Volume 1 of Rodolfo Ritter's survey contains all these and many more exciting discoveries. As a Mexican pianist, teacher and scholar of German heritage, Rodolfo Ritter is ideally placed to guide us through such unfamiliar territory.

Principally surveying the Pr�ludes and Images, the first two volumes of Alessandra Ammara's Debussy survey have attracted praise for their affinity with the composer's elusive but painterly idiom. According to Fanfare, "Ammara reveals her sensitivity to the Debussy sound world, rife with blurred outlines of objects and infiltrated with variegated light, in the manner of the painter J. M. W. Turner." For Volume 3, her focus turns principally to the set of 12 �tudes, which miraculously took shape over the course of just two months, in August and September 1915. Plagued by ill health following the diagnosis of rectal cancer in 1909, presented with the pressing need to increase his earnings through editing and performing, Debussy wrote the �tudes while staying in a town near Dieppe, on the Normandy coast. Emerging from a period of severe depression, he once more took inspiration from the sea in a sudden and final burst of creativity, which also saw the composition of the suite for two pianos, en blanc et noir, and the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. However, it is the 12 �tudes which have come both to define Debussy's late style - on the piano, as a counterpart to his ballet for Diaghilev, Jeux - and to present both a model and a challenge to later composers of piano �tudes from Tansman to Ligeti. Debussy himself said that they were "a warning to pianists not to take up the musical profession unless they have remarkable hands". While the dry titles of the individual �tudes serve to conceal their rich and turbulent inner landscape, aspects of their invention are prefigured by the earlier works on Alessandra Ammara's album. The three movements of Estampes are as much "studies" in their way as the �tudes - of particular kinds of movement refracted through the images of a Japanese pagoda, a Spanish evening, and a garden in the rain. From 1904, and capturing the passion of his affair with Emma Bardac, L'isle joyeuse references both the island of Jersey and a painting by Watteau, but it also serves as a study in superimposed scales.