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ROMANTIC PIANO FAVOURITES, VOL. 8 |
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Composer: |
Sergei Rachmaninov, Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Richard Ellenberg , Felix Mendelssohn, Fryderyk Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Benjamin Godard, Leopold Godowsky, Juventino Rosas, Johannes Brahms |
Artist: |
Idil Biret, Jussi Bjorling, Jeno Jando, Peter Nagy, Takako Nishizaki, Konstantin Scherbakov, Balazs Szokolay, Fritz Kreisler, Alfred Cortot, John McCormack, Arthur Rubinstein, Ruei-Bin Chen, Beniamino Gigli, Richard Tauber, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Mischa Levitzki, Alfred Brendel, Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, Roland Pontinen, Vincent O'Brien, Ivan Moravec, Laszlo Simon, Robin McCabe, Gerhard Oppitz, Gerald Garcia, Ethel Leginska, Isabelle Yalkovsky, Florian Krumpock, Maria Ivanova, Sviatoslav Richter, Dinu Lipatti, Marie-Catherine Girod, Sebastian Knauer, Michael Korstick, Tzimon Barto, Cedric Tiberghien, Terence Dennis, Susanne Lang, Sachiko Furuhata-Kersting, Julian Gorus, Florence Delaage, Ben Schoeman |
Conductor: |
Rainaldo Zamboni, Nils Grevillius, Ondrej Lenard |
Orchestra: |
Capella Istropolitana, Stockholm Concert Association Orchestra, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Studio orchestra |
Lyricist: |
Victor Capoul, Armand Silvestre |
Label: |
Naxos |
Catalogue No.: |
8.550217 |
Format: |
CD |
Barcode: |
0730099521727 |
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Popular Piano Pieces, Vol. 8
The eighth album of popular piano pieces covers a wide variety of
music, from Gluck to Godowsky. The collection opens with a transcription by the
great nineteenth century virtuoso Franz Liszt of one of Schubert's most popular
songs, Die Forelle, which tells of the sad fate of a trout, clever, but not
clever enough to avoid being caught. The original poem added a caution to
unwary girls, but Schubert omitted the moral of the tale.
The famous Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler provided himself with a
number of short pieces that he might play at the end of a recital or on a
single side of a record. Liebesfreud, the other side of the coin to Liebesleid,
the Sorrow of Love, was transcribed for the piano by the Russian pianist, composer
and conductor Sergey Rakhmaninov.
Liszt, Hungarian by birth, was taken to Paris as a boy and settled
there until an affair with a married woman, the Comtesse Marie d'Agoult,
obliged him to move elsewhere. The years of travel that followed, while he continued
to pursue his career as one of the most remarkable concert pianists the world
has seen, gave rise to a series of pieces, collected under the title Années de
Pèlerinage. The second of these, devoted to Italy, includes musical
translations of three sonnets by the Renaissance laureate Petrarch, composed
during a stay in Rome and devised as songs as well as piano transcriptions.
The 49 Songs without Words written by Mendelssohn provided contemporary
audiences with much pleasure. Although the composer himself preferred generally
to avoid titles for these short pieces, Opus 53 No.2 is sometimes given the
title The Fleecy Clouds. It was
written in 1839 and published two years later.
Brahms also found a ready market for his Hungarian Dances, publishing four
sets of dances for piano duet and arranging half of them for solo piano. The
first set so transcribed appeared in 1869, and reflect the interest taken in
national music, whether genuine or imitated.
The ungrammatical Moments musicals of Schubert were written between
1822 and 1828, the year of the composer’s death, appearing as a set of six in
July of that year, issued by his publisher Leidesdorf, the presumable
perpetrator of the French solecism. The miniature pieces are of characteristic
charm.
The Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Gluck’s opera on the subject of
Orpheus, the legendary musician of the ancient world, has for long provided
flautists with a vehicle of self- expression. The first version of the opera
was produced in Vienna in 1762 and starred an Italian castrato singer Guadagni
who had learned his acting under David Garrick in London. It began a new period
in the history of opera, in which there was a greater degree of realism than
had been possible within the older conventions of the art.
Great composers have often turned their hands to lesser things, and
Beethoven, no exception, wrote a number of sets of dances for the piano, music
that had an obvious practical application in the Vienna of his time. Among
these came several sets of minuets, published in the mid-1790s, to be followed
in the next decade by sets of Laendler, Contredanses and Scottish Dances. The
Minuet in G remains probably the best known of all.
Benjamin Godard, French composer and viola-player, won a considerable
reputation for himself in Paris, particularly with his choral dramatic symphony
on the subject of the Italian poet Tasso, a figure of romantic appeal. His many
salon pieces found favour, but in the opera-house he won less success. and the
Berceuse from the opera Jocelyn, staged in Brussels in 1888. survives almost
alone from his six attempts at work on this scale.
Richard Ellenberg's Idyll, The Mill
in the Black Forest, is followed here by one of the 30 pieces
published by the Polish born virtuoso Leopold Godowsky under the title Triakontameron, the first of the thirty
days to be spent in Tangiers, on the way back to Old Vienna. Juventino Rosas, a
Mexican Indian, earned his living as a violinist and as a composer of salon
music, including the five waltzes under the title Sobre los olas, wrongly attributed by some to Johann
Strauss.
Chopin succeeded in creating from the waltz, a dance that had become
the rage in ball-rooms and dance-halls, something very much more poetic,
re-stating it in his own imimitable idiom. The Waltz in E minor, published
twenty years after his death, was written in Warsaw in 1830 at the outset of
the composer's career, which was to lead him first to Vienna and then, in 1831,
to Paris, his home until his death in 1849.
The two sets of Etudes-tableaux written by Sergey Rakhmaninov, and
published in 1911 and 1917, have' been described, with the Preludes, as
miniature tone-poems. The dramatic E flat minor Etude-tableau from the second
set brings the present collection to a fiery and impressive conclusion.
Péter Nagy
Péter Nagy was born in Eastern Hungary in 1960 and is among the leading
pianists of the younger generation in his native country. He entered the Ferenc
Liszt Academy in Budapest at the age of 15, after winning various prizes at
home and abroad, making his first professional international appearances in
Finland and in Yugoslavia in 1977, followed by concerts at the Salzburg
Interforum in 1978 in a duo with his compatriot Balazs Szokolay. In the same
year he toured the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union and in 1979
made his debut in France at the Menton Festival. There followed concerts in
West Germany, Switzerland, and the United States of America, where he took
further lessons from Gyorgy Sebók at Indiana University. Na gy has played in
Japan with various orchestras, was in 1987 Artist-in-Residence at the Canberra
School of Music in Australia, and has taken part in the festivals of
Aix-en-Provence, Athens, Llandatt, Carditt, Paris, Bonn, Cologne, Geneva,
Moscow and Leningrad. He is at present soloist with the Hungarian National
Philharmonic Orchestra and a member of the teaching staff of the Liszt Academy
in Budapest.