First released in 2015, unavailable now for some time, this complete survey of Reynaldo Hahn’s piano music features several first recordings as well as a feast of charming and unfamiliar music from the golden age of the French salon. Though he is probably now best known for a stream of winning and witty songs, the shimmering diversity of Hahn’s output for solo piano bears the mark of quintessentially French qualities, as though the Venezuelan composer was seeking to demonstrate that Paris was his true home. Many pieces here derive their refined charm not only from their elegance, their lightness of touch and sensuous harmony – all ‘French’ qualities by association – but Hahn is still capable of springing surprises throughout the novel forms and piquant harmonies of his most substantial collection, Le rossignol éperdu.

Themes running through this music are deft portraits of people, landscapes and seas: a quartet of painters inspired by the poetry of Proust (1894); from two years earlier, an 11-minute suite dedicated to moonlight (Au clair de lune); a sextet of delicious Asian and near-Eastern evocations such as a nocturne over the Bosphorus. Hahn readily adopts a neoclassical costume when it suits him, in eight tone-paintings of Versailles and the Thème varié sur le nom de Haydn which he was invited to write in 1910 as a centenary tribute alongside Debussy and the other French greats of their day. Alessandro Deljavan began studying the piano when he was not quite two years old. By the age of 16, he had already graduated from his degree in piano from the Verdi Conservatory in Milan. He has performing worldwide, and been placed highly in many competitions such as the Van Cliburn in Texas.

‘She is adventurous, as well as accomplished’ (Fanfare) – Ilia Kim’s second volume of Clementi for Piano Classics juxtaposes a quartet of musical ‘trifles’ with a trio of adventurous mid-period sonatas. In Ilia Kim’s new recital, Clementi comes across in all his remarkable individuality. She opens with the F sharp minor Sonata Op. 25 No. 5: a work stirred by strong passions, far from the polite, elegant and superficial manner with which Clementi is sometimes associated, reaching a powerful climax in its Lento e patetico slow movement. By contrast, the D major Sonata Op. 25 No. 6 is a work of Haydnesque high spirits and uncomplicated good humor, in which the chromatic harmony lending such pathos to Op. 25 No. 5 takes on an air of mischief. The Sonata Op. 37 No. 2 was published in 1798, and belongs to the period of his maturity. The first movement is symphonic in scale and reminiscent of Haydn. The second is clearly inspired by Handel, while the lively finale is a like a dazzling finale to a comic opera. The sonata embodies and reconciles different styles, even within the first movement, where the first theme in the symphonic style alternates with the counterpoint of the second theme and the brilliant piano style of the connections and developments.

Korean born, Italian resident Ilia Kim performs across Europe and Asia, specializing in thematically linked programs of Romantic repertoire. Her experience as a fortepianist also informs her playing of Classical-era repertoire on the piano such as these Clementi recordings for Piano Classics.

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.

Born in 1985, the Italian pianist Maria Argentiero gained an enthusiastic online following during lockdown with her streamed performances of repertoire from Haydn to Satie, Kapustin and beyond. She teaches in Rome and specializes as a performer in quirkier voices from the past century such as Tansman. The booklet features a thorough profile of the composer and his piano music, plus an interview between Maria Argentiero and Marianne Tansman, the composer’s daughter, who recalls him as a ‘very loving but very anxious’ father. Alexander Tansman (1897-1986) was born in Lodz, Poland, into a wealthy Jewish family of great culture. He spoke 5 languages and studied law and philosophy. His early compositions show experiments with atonality and 12-tone music. In 1919 he left Poland for Paris, where he settled permanently.

Tansman: “I spent the first twenty years of my life in Poland. In regard to the importance of Slavic influence in my music, I can readily say that I followed the same path as Bartók or Manuel de Falla: folklore imaginé. I did not use popular themes per se. I used, however, their general melodic contour. This folklore remained strongly present in my musical sensitivity.”

One could say that Tansman had a similar approach to writing music as Chopin – namely to use folklore as source material to be transformed by his imagination, without actual quoting. In a similar vein he used the different traditions he encountered when travelling round the globe, no matter whether it was jazz, gamelan or Japanese music. This new recording presents a selection of piano music by Tansman: the jazzy Sonatine Transatlantique, Trois Préludes en forme de blues, and the cycle La Tour du monde en miniature, delightful and vibrant musical depictions of places from all over the world.

Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) was a highly successful female pianist and composer. As a pianist she toured the European countries, in 1892 making her debut in England, making acquaintance with one of her biggest fans, Queen Victoria. In 1908 she made her American debut, gaining instant and immense popularity. The reason for Chaminade’s popularity is the charm, tunefulness and general accessibility of her music. It touches a ready chord with every music lover, and the fancy titles and not overly virtuosic piano writing made that her works became drawing room favorites of the epoch.

For his second Chaminade album British pianist Mark Viner chose the Six Concert Studies, substantial and demanding works, Six Pièces humoristiques Op. 87, and some engaging and attractive character pieces: L’Ondine, Danse Créole and the favorite Lolita, Caprice Espagnol, all played with Viner’s unerring feeling for the witty and charming style, pouring out sentiment without being sentimental. Gramophone wrote about Viner’s first Chaminade album: “This new survey must count among the finest yet, showing the range and ambition of Chaminade in short works, played with an innate charm and understanding of the genre. In addition, it is most beautifully recorded. Mark Viner is recognized as one of the foremost British pianists, a strong advocate of lesser-known romantic piano music. One of his most ambitious and successful enterprises is the recording of the complete piano music by Charles-Valentin Alkan, now at volume 5, several of which issues received the highest praise in the press (5 star review, Gramophone Editor’s Choice).

REVIEW:

Cécile Chaminade’s well crafted, idiomatic, communicative, and utterly charming solo piano works are more and more finding their way to disc. I’m not certain if Mark Viner’s second Piano Classics release devoted to this composer signifies a complete cycle in the works, yet his robust virtuosity and overall dynamism vibrantly elevate this repertoire from the salon to the stage.

L’Ondine’s pearly runs, for example, tellingly contrast to the full-bodied chordal climaxes, while Viner makes more of Au pays dévasté’s brooding countenance than others. He brings a probing deliberation and almost tragic spin to the familiar Autrefois from the 6 Pièces humoristiques Op. 87 in a reading that radically differs from Joanne Polk’s fleeting, cameo-like treatment. Viner’s quickly flickering left-hand arpeggios in Guitare lilt in a manner that evokes Chaminade’s piano roll interpretation. If Polk’s Etude romantique Op. 132 is crisper and more incisively articulated than Viner’s, his Etude symphonique Op. 28 conveys greater textural depth, while the Etude scholastique Op. 139’s tarantella-like figurations effortlessly click their heels. Viner’s detailed and insightful annotations flesh out this most welcome release.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

Born in 1996, Giorgio Trione Bartoli won many piano competitions in his native Italy before making his career as a performer specialising in Liszt and the central-Romantic repertoire, and as a professor of piano presently based at the conservatoire in Foggia. This release marks his debut on Piano Classics. A multiplicity of cultural influences makes the figure of Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), an American pianist-composer trained for a long time in Europe, particularly original. Born in New York, he received his first lessons from Colombian, Cuban and Venezuelan musicians, including the famous pianist Teresa Carreño. At the age of seventeen, MacDowell continued his studies at the Paris Conservatory, in Antoine Marmontel's class, and then at the Frankfurt Hochschule, where he studied composition with Joachim Raff. He was listened to by Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt, and was introduced by the latter to the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig. In 1888 he returned to the United Sates where he settled in Boston, combining his work as a composer with that of a concert pianist. When he moved to New York in 1896, he also taught at Columbia University, where MacDowell was the first to create a music department. In the same year, 1896, the MacDowells bought a farm in New Hampshire, an ideal place to pursue musical creativity in a peaceful rural setting. Much of MacDowell's compositional output dates from this happy period, including two piano concertos, two orchestral suites, four symphonic poems, several piano suites, Songs, four piano sonatas and numerous piano transcriptions of 18th-century music. Macdowell’s sources of inspiration are to be found in German romanticism, both poetic (Goethe, Heine) and musical (Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms), combined with a predilection for Nordic sagas, establishing a Celtic Revival (MacDowell's had Irish and Scottish origins).

Bernard Van Dieren (1887-1936) was essentially self-taught as a composer, though friendships with Schoenberg, Busoni, Sorabji, Walton, and Lambert all obliquely indicate by association both the technical confidence of his work as well as the variegated colors of his harmonic palette.

He was born in Rotterdam but fell in love with and then married a pupil of Busoni’s, Frida Kindler, who gave the first performances of most of his piano music. While earlier works such as the powerful Toccata approach Schoenbergian atonality in their tightly woven chromaticism, Van Dieren’s world is at root a diatonic one, stretching rather than breaking tonalities with a post-Wagnerian sensibility often comparable to the music of Delius. The composer himself was apparently a pianist of modest ability, but (perhaps not least thanks to Frida Kindler) he writes for the instrument with a formidable array of pianistic technique grounded in his own enduring love of counterpoint.

The most straightforwardly appealing music here is a set of 12 Dutch folk melodies on album 2, followed by a charming little prelude written for Frida’s birthday in 1934 – his last piano work before his death from a long-standing kidney complaint two years later. The pianist Christopher Guild, renowned for his advocacy of lesser-known pianistic voices, is then joined by Dr James Reid-Baxter for the first-ever recording of the Ballad de Villon, in which Van Dieren originally set a prayer to the Virgin for reciter and string quartet, with the instrumental lines later transcribed for the piano by Philip Heseltine. Album 1 features a set of six densely polyphonic ‘Sketches’ in the style of Busoni and a Theme and Variations in the grand Romantic manner.

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.

Hungarian pianist Klara Wurtz performs two late sonatas by Franz Schubert. Her insights into the deeper meanings within the keyboard works of Schubert has lead Fanfare to compare her interpretations to the likes of Brendel, Perahia and Uchida.

Classical Music

Leonardo Pierdomenico was a finalist at the Van Cliburn International Competition held in May 2017 in Fort Worth, Texas. Six months later he made this, his debut studio album, which is sure to be listened to eagerly by pianophiles across the world. Pierdomenico played the Second Concerto of Liszt in the Van Cliburn competition final, and his performance won him the Raymond E. Buck Jury Discretionary Award; his semifinal performance of Chopin’s First Ballade was included on the internationally released album of highlights from the competition. Born in Pescara, he has performed across Italy having graduated from his local conservatoire, as well as giving recitals in major venues in Berlin and Brussels. Liszt is a natural choice for his debut recital. However, Pierdomenico has largely chosen the path less well trodden in his selection from Liszt’s vast oeuvre. He has concentrated on the brooding, melancholic and introverted sides of the composer’s multifaceted personality. The Csardas macabre is one of Liszt’s most radical conceptions, with sequences that push at the boundaries of tonality. The two are Legendes based on the miracles of two of the composer’s namesake Saints, St. Francis of Assisi, who allegedly preached a sermon to an attentive flock of birds, and St. Francis of Paola who, legend has it, crossed the Strait of Messina fashioning a vessel from his cloak and staff after a ferryman refused him passage. As well as the justly ubiquitous Second Ballade, Pierdomenico gives a rare outing to the ‘crusader’s song’ of the First; another rarity is the single-movement Scherzo und Marsch which finds the composer in heroic vein, replete with demanding fugato sections and rapier-like arpeggios.

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REVIEW:

Would that half the seasoned Lisztians I know had Pierdomenico’s keen ear for stylistic differentiation within this half-century of repertory. His highly developed technique and cultivated sound, both adaptable to a variety of affects, are wedded to those twin essentials for artistic Liszt-playing: imagination combined with thoroughgoing, scrupulous musicality.

– Gramophone

After his ‘outstanding’ (The Guardian) series of Piano Classics albums dedicated to the music of Alkan, Vincenzo Maltempo turns to repertoire that also belongs to the post-Romantic age of sweeping eloquence and high-flown fantasy, growing out of the work of Liszt and Brahms, whose concertos featured on Maltempo’s most recent Piano Classics recording. Here are three sonatas from the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian music from the turn of the last century, all exploiting a virtuoso technique to the full. The narrative arc and harmonies of Robert Schumann’s music make their mark on the rippling arpeggios and ardent lyricism of the Second Sonata by Alexander Glazunov. The Guardian also praised Maltempo’s handling of Schumann on a recent album of the Sonata Op.14 and other, less-familiar works: with his ‘intimate, delicately colored accounts’, ‘it’s clear in every phrase here that Maltempo is much, much more than just an Alkan specialist.’ Least known of the composers here is the Ukrainian Victor Kosenko (1896-1938), whose sonatas have long attracted pianists in search of grand statements in the Lisztian tradition. The three movements of the Second are laid out on a relatively compact scale that belies their technical demands and majestic vein of expression; any listener who appreciates the architecture of Medtner’s sonatas will find much to enjoy in Kosenko. The four-movement sonata by Balakirev begins with a modestly self-contained Andantino but builds through a stamping mazurka and ardent intermezzo to a finale of exhilarating drive and passion on the scale of the composer’s Islamey, which remains a barnstorming showpiece for virtuoso pianists at the highest level. On this showing, Maltempo may certainly be counted among them. Italian pianist Vincenzo Maltempo, one of the most interesting pianists of the young generation, is clearly at home in this repertoire, which he showed in his staggering recording of the Transcendental Studies by Lyapunov (PCL0124), which received 5 stars in several classical magazines.

This new recording presents a generous selection of transcriptions Franz Liszt made from Wagner orchestral works. + An ardent and devoted admirer of Wagner, Liszt supported him by performing his new operas in Weimar, and by making transcriptions to further popularize his music. + Liszt transfers the orchestral sonorities to the piano, creating new works of art. Francois Dumont is one of the foremost pianists of the young French generation. + As Laureate of the Warsaw Chopin competition he attracted international recognition. + His recordings have won a Diapason d’Or and other prizes.

The composer and pianist Nikolai Kapustin has criss-crossed the territories of classical and jazz throughout his long career. The Korean pianist Sun Hee You presents a collection of Kapustin's piano works that feature the range of Kapustin's output, from the complex works of great depth that his sonatas represent, to his homage to Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" contained within his Variations and the pieces that bear the unmistakable cadences and influences that Kapustin's 1950s jazz forays left with him. Her performance both a stunning virtuosity with a clear grasp of Kapustin's sensibilities and make for a fine introduction to this composer little known outside of Russia.

Klára Würtz releases her fourth album for Piano Classics, performing music by Janácek and Kódaly, music closely related to the landscape, folklore and soul in their countries of origin. Janácek's suites "In the Mist" and "On an Overgrown Path" contain miniatures of the most heartbreaking intimacy, from deep sorrow and melancholy to utter bliss and joy. In the works of Kódaly, there is a direct and palpable connection with the folk music of Hungary and Transylvania. Klára Würtz, Hungarian by birth, knows the secret language of this music and her musical intuition finds the most telling melodic inflections in this speaking music.