Tag Archives: Divine Art

Vladimir Rebikov

russian piano          Russian Piano Music Series (volume 2)

 

Anthony Goldstone (piano)

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TTP: 70’05”

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

This is a most welcome addition to the discography of Russian music for the piano.

 

Most of the pieces here are short, ranging from durations as brief as 23 seconds to  two or three minutes. There’s one larger scale offering: Esclavage et liberte which runs for just under twenty minutes..

 

As a schoolboy growing up many years ago in Cape Town and an enthusiastic competitor in local eisteddfodau, I often played set pieces by Ladoukhin, Maykapar, Karganov, Goedicke, Rebikov – and numbers of so-called Fairy Tales by Medtner. Nearly all of these, as I recall, were published by Chester. Their level of difficulty approximated some of the trickier pieces in Schumann’s Album for the Young. They were handy to play at piano teachers’ end-of-term concerts and at school prize giving ceremonies.

 

Very few of these miniatures are available on CD which is a shame as these morceaux deserve an occasional airing – and this recording of music of Rebikov is a welcome addition to the recorded repertoire, not least because, according to the liner notes, of the 43 tracks, one – and one only – has previously been recorded. The soloist in this miniature was Shura Cherkassky who would offer it as an encore from time to time: the charming, lilting little Valse from The Christmas Tree suite.

 

Rebikov, born in Siberia in 1866, died in warmer climes (Yalta in the Crimea)  in  1920, leaving a great deal of music, much of it now being recorded by enterprising and adventurous pianists such as Anthony Goldstone.

 

Rebikov wrote in a bewildering variety of styles; many are on offer here.

 

Listen to The Devils Amuse Themselves and The Giant Dance. Both call for emphatic, foot-stamping heaviness. Goldstone presents these noisy little pieces with gusto. Bittersweet melancholy informs almost every moment of the six brief utterances that are collectively called Autumn Leaves. This is hardly great music but certainly worth an occasional airing.

 

A liner note suggests that the very short items that together make up A Festival anticipate the ultra-brief pieces of Webern. As well, the opening Vivo eerily calls   Stravinsky’s Petrouchka to mind in its rhythmic treatment – and there’s a gritty gaiety to the following miniature which Goldstone despatches with nimble, accurate fingers.

 

Of the suite – Pictures for Children – it is The Music Lesson, in particular, that delights with its deliberate pedal blurring depicting a piano pupil very much under par And The Promenade of the Gnomes makes a graceful obeisance to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

The Piano at the Carnival

Anthony Goldstone (piano)

Piano at the Carnival

TPT: 76’31”

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reviewed by Neville Cohn

Anthony Goldstone is one of the most resourceful pianists currently before the public. He has done wonders over years resurrecting music which, for one reason or another, has fallen into disuse. Indeed, the only tracks here that could be thought of as main stream repertoire are those devoted to Schumann’s Carnival which, of course, is available in umpteen other versions on CD.

It’s the rarities that are the main fascination of this recording.

Sydney Smith’s Fantaisie brillante on Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, for instance, is claimed as a first ever on record apart from a piano roll made circa 1919. Some might tut tut at its often superficial writing which it would not be inaccurate to describe as frankly cheap salon material – but its sometimes schmaltzy measures are offered with such gusto and brilliance that its inherent shallowness is forgotten for the duration of the performance. And in a first ever recording of Paul Klengel’s arrangement of Dvorak’s Carnival Overture, Goldstone seems positively to relish coming to grips with its many keyboard challenges. He emerges unscathed from this traversing of a treacherous musical landscape with ebullient, admirably buoyant, playing that marshals avalanches of notes with immense flair.

I liked particularly the skill that Goldstone brings to Chopin’s Souvenir de Paganini (The Carnival of Venice), its much loved theme presented in gorgeous filigree terms with fine tonal light and shade, the composer’s idiosyncratic harmonies contributing to most satisfying listening. But an account of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 9 (The Carnival of Pesth) tends to ramble in a reading where the soloist might to advantage have surrendered more fully to the Muse.

Khatchaturian’s Masquerade Suite is known to millions in its original incarnation for orchestra. Here, Goldstone gives us the premiere recording of Alexander Dolukhanian’s version of the suite for solo piano. Each of the five movements is finely considered with the concluding Galop a particular delight: the playing is informed by immense brio before a brief moment of reflection, then an all-stops-out conclusion at top speed at high decibel levels.

Sacred Hearts and Secret Music

SacredHearts 

Musica Secreta and Celestial Sirens

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reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Missa Veni Sponsa Christi (Palestrina)

Lamentations for Holy Saturday (Book 3) (Palestrina)

Magnificat Sexti Toni (De Rore)

with motets by Palestrina and Rore and chants for The Feast of St Agnes

 

If you’ve come home after a terrible day at the office or, if you’ve spent hours in the kitchen getting the cake mix just right only to have it come from the oven a charred ruin, then don’t turn to Valium or take it out on the cat. There’s a much better option available.

 

It needs to be said at once, though, that the alternative offered could also be habit forming – but it’s an addiction that is entirely beneficial and can be thoroughly recommended. Toss the pills into the bin and give the cat his dinner – then put this CD on, sit back and let it work its soothing magic. An added bonus is that you don’t have to be musically literate – although that, of course, helps – to derive great listening pleasure from it.

 

Not the least of the many fine features of this recording are first rate liner notes which throw fascinating light on the lives and work of nuns in 16th and 17th century European convents where music, in inextricable association with prayer, was a constant companion in up to eight prayer services per 24 hours.

 

In the popular imagination, the notion of nuns regularly singing complex polyphony barely exists. So, this recording is timely if only for that reason.

 

Of course, the lion’s share of sacred vocal music was written specifically for male voices. A fair amount of this, though, was – and is – also sung by women. And if the range was too low, then it was not particularly unusual for the music to be transposed upwards to accommodate the available voices. This presentation goes some way to redressing these widespread misapprehensions.

 

As well, there is also a view that composers of the time wrote little vocal music specifically for women. But think of Vivaldi who spent much of his working life in an  orphanage for girls for whom the Red Priest wrote innumerable works, instrumental as well as vocal.

 

The contents of Sacred Hearts and Secret Music are sung with an unpretentious artistry that allows the music to make maximum impact on the listener. It deserves to be heard by the widest possible audience; it is a most notable addition to the recorded canon of sacred music


Cello/Diverse

Susi 018_2Susanne Beer (1) 

Susanne Beer (cello)

Gareth Hancock (piano)

TPT: 59’46”

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reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Stravinsky: Suite Italienne; Debussy: Sonata for cello and piano; Brahms: Sonata for cello and piano opus 99; Morricone: Gabriel’s Oboe

 

On the first page of the score of Suite Italienne, in the space to the right just above the first line of music, appears the name Igor Stravinsky. I dare say some might assume, without question, that the music is by the famed creator of ballet scores such as Petrouchka, Firebird and Rite of Spring. To me, his name on the page is an artistic fraud. The delightful, charm-laden melodies of Suite Italienne are not in even the remotest sense the product of a man who, for all his genius, had great difficulty in creating memorable melodies. (He was in good company here; Beethoven, for instance, struggled for novel melody unlike, say, Schubert whose melodic gift was like an unstoppable torrent).

 

So, Stravinksy stole melodies – yes, stole – in the sense of purloining what did not belong to him from composers who could not fight back because they were long dead. Then, Stravinsky rewrote their delightful pieces – primarily by Pergolesi – and ensured there were a number of dissonances to make it sound ‘modern’ (although Stravinsky retained most of the original harmonies) and then raked in a bucket of money in the form of royalties. He got a good deal of mileage out of his pilfered goods with at least two suites from the ballet for violin and piano as well as this version for cello and piano.

 

There’s a splendid lift to the phrase in the Introduction – and in the following Serenata, Susanne Beer draws a fine ribbon of sound from her instrument, all the while informing the music with the most engaging lilt. There’s excellent double stopping here. Beer and her attentive piano partner Gareth Hancock bring an altogether appropriate sense of bucolic gruffness to the Aria and, in the Tarantella, set and maintain a spanking pace with a fine sense of onward momentum. It makes for bracing listening. Yet again, tone is excellent from both musicians, splendidly apparent in the rhythmic gusto they bring to the Finale.

 

Beer and Hancock are no less persuasive in Debussy’s Sonata, sounding equally convincing in stylistic terms in both turbulent and musing measures in the first movement. The Serenade and Finale make no less rewarding listening, much of it couched in passionate terms with eerie pizzicato conjuring up images of goblinesque cavortings. At the time of writing this work, Debussy was already in the grip of an unstoppable cancer – but his creativity here is at its highest, an act of wonderful creative defiance in the face of impending doom.

 

Brahms’ Sonata is given a model performance which comfortably holds its own against most of the competition. I very much admired the skill with which the players convey the essence of the slow movement, allowing the music to speak for itself. And the manner in which the restless demon lurking behind the printed note of the Allegro passionato is revealed is masterly.

 

 Morricone’s Gabriel’s Oboe is given nostalgia-drenched treatment.


Nuages

 

Panayiotis Demopoulos (piano)

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TTP: 58:00

reviewed by Neville Cohn

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Liszt: Nuages gris; La lugubre gondola 1; Unstern; Vallee d’Obermann

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No 30 in E, opus 109

Demopoulos: Terakyts for solo piano

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Photo Credit: P.Demopoulos/Divine Art

 

 

I have long ago lost count of the number of performances – both live and recorded – I have listened to of Beethoven’s Sonata in E, opus 109. Many of them have been presentations of sterling worth, not least the recording Dame Myra Hess, late in life, put down on  HMV 78rpm discs. Even though she was by then past her prime, the chief joy of that long-ago performance was the poetic quality that suffused so much of the recording.

 

Panayiotis Demopoulos’ account calls that of Dame Myra to mind; its first movement, too, often has a poetic, extemporaneous quality that lifts it into a high category of excellence. With notes clothed in golden tone, dramatic outbursts and lyrical contemplation are finely contrasted. Certainly, the sensitivity with which Demopoulos employs rubato here is exemplary. And the toughly assertive manner and unflagging momentum that informs the prestissimo movement comes across impressively.

 

In the first of the variations which comprise the finale, Demopoulos maintains a sense of onward momentum at very slow speed; it’s a remarkable feat of musicianship. In Variation 2, staccato notes, like winking lights, call pointillism to mind. Nimble, sure fingers make light of the difficulties posed by Variation 3. Calmly reflective playing in Variation 4 gives way to impeccable contrapuntal, bright-toned playing. And extended, finely spun trills radiate calmness in Variation 6; it’s a tour de force.

 

Much of the opening movement of opus 109 has a dreamlike, extemporaneous quality and that is even more apparent in much of a bracket of four too-seldom-heard works by Liszt. Because none of these could be thought of as crowd-pleasers as, say, some of the Hungarian Rhapsodies or etudes are, they are seldom aired. More’s the pity because they enshrine some of the composer’s most memorable musical thoughts.

 

Beautifully controlled tremolo emphasises the bodeful, rather sinister quality of Nuages gris (Grey Clouds) – and the melancholy essence of La lugubre gondola 1 is masterfully evoked. Eerily, a month after Liszt wrote this funeral piece, Richard Wagner (with whom Liszt was staying at the time in Venice) died and was borne from his last home on just such a vessel. Here, too, Demopoulos shapes to the stylistic and physical demands of the music like wine to a goblet. This is equally apparent in  Unstern (Evil Star) in which insistent, imperious, stark utterances call Liszt’s much better known Funerailles to mind. Demopoulos clearly identifies with the piano music of Liszt – and no more so than in Vallee d’Obermann. Here, too, Demopoulos plays as if to the manner born, evoking the introspective, desolate, forsaken essence of the music. It is a tour de force.

 

In Taraktys, we hear Demopoulos as both composer and pianist in the four variations that comprise the work, the first dramatically dense-textured, with darting arabesques and simulation of a tolling bell, the second heavy-toned with massive blocks of tone hurling from the speakers. Variation three is softly dissonant and introspective, the fourth and final variation encompassing delicate arabesques