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

Before his emergence as one of the greatest musical figures of the 19th century, Richard Wagner wrote a series of overtures that chart his early compositional development. The two high-octane Concert Overtures reflect his Beethovenian and Classical lineage, whereas the overture to the historical tragedy Konig Enzio reveals a greater sense of melancholy and nobility. Heroism is the key to his first opera, Die Feen, while his second, Das Liebesverbot, is saturated in beguiling Mediterranean color. Siegfried Idyll, a surprise birthday gift for his second wife, Cosima, is a tender and intimate celebration of scenes of family life. The MDR Leipzip Radio Symphony Orchestra is Germany’s oldest radio orchestra. In addition to its regular presence on the radio, television, and internet, it delights a wide public with its concerts in the area served by MDR and beyond. On a worldwide scale, the orchestra can be heard via the European Broadcasting Union, on tour, and at guest performances.

Joan Sutherland is known for her great recordings made during the sixties of Donizetti and Bellini alongside powerhouse Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti. Sutherland, however, had other remarkable stage partners. Among them was Alfedo Kraus. This live recording was made in San Francisco in 1966. The partnership of Alfredo Kraus and Joan Sutherland in this opera is a matchless experience, and makes listeners realize the formidable performing needs of the Italian Romantic Opera.

The rich Glenn Gould discography is enlarging of a series of recordings performed by the artist between 1960 and 1963 for the television and now are presented for the frist time on disc, after a digital remastering. Glenn Gould had a personal propension for some Beethoven, specifically Variations, Op. 34 and Op. 35, of which he often performed live when he was younger. His interpretation of the two movements Adagio ma non torppo and the fuga of Sonata No. 110 are really something unique in his career as a performer and artist. These masterpieces are now available for the public and Gould fans.

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The success of Bizet’s opera Carmen has overshadowed the rest of his output, but this fascinating orchestral programme, which includes a number of seldom performed works, reveals more of his talent for writing colourful, atmospheric and melodic music. The Overture in A was Bizet’s first orchestral work and unperformed in his lifetime, while the Marche funèbre was originally the prelude to an opera about love and vengeance, now lost. The dramatic overture Patrie captures the mood following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, while the Petite suite is a set of orchestrations of movements from Jeux d’enfants (Children’s Games). Conceived in Italy as a symphony, after Bizet had won the Prix de Rome, Roma occupied the composer for 11 years before the final version heard here.

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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Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor (1956)

Donizetti: Il duca d' Alba (Sung in Italian) [Live]

Strauss: Die Fledermaus (1951)

Verdi: Nabucco (Recorded Live 1959)

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4, Op. 58 & Symphony No. 3, Op

Rossini: Guglielmo Tell (1954)

Rossini: Il Barbiere di Siviglia nella trascrizione per Harm

Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor (1957)

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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.

PAGANINI: Works for Solo Violin (Complete)

Karajan in Italy, Vol. 2

MEYERBEER: Semiramide riconosciuta

WAGNER: Die Feen

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

VERDI: Simon Boccanegra

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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

Eugene Asti writes of this new release: "When I was trying to decide which solo pieces to record, I felt drawn to the late piano works as they seemed in some way related to his songs. Brahms's Lieder are some of his most intimate and personal compositions, and although small in scale, there is a wealth of emotional depth and poetic sensibility to be explored in them. The exact same thing can be said of the late piano works, which are likewise small in dimension and certainly not composed as virtuosic showpieces. They are also among the most beautiful and profound of all his works, possessing a truly vocal quality with which, as a song pianist, I can immediately identify (some could almost be called 'songs without words'). In the making of this recording, I was very fortunate that LAWO chose a wonderful reconditioned Steinway D dating from 1893, which is just a year after the composition of these late piano pieces." Eugene Asti is one of the foremost accompanists of his generation, and regularly tours and records as a solo musician. His many recordings have garnered him widespread critical acclaim.

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