Skip to main content

Piano Music Vol. 2

With recordings of Chopin's music, very often (too often for my liking) one gets series of pieces of the same type lumped together: all of the Waltzes, for example; or all four Ballades one after another. While this can work fairly well - with the Nocturnes, for instance, where there is a certain unity of purpose but also a sufficient variety of execution; in other cases it can easily become monotonous - such as hearing dozens and dozens of the Mazurkas without any kind of intermission: who really wants that?

To my mind, well-thought-out recital programmes comprising a variety of different kinds of piece are the ideal way to experience the composer's work. This Piano Music Vol. 2 LP adopts both approaches. On side 1 are the four Impromptus arranged in order of publication, and the Berceuse; whereas on side 2 there are the Barcarolle, one of the Nocturnes and the 3rd Scherzo. Fortunately, the improvisatory nature of the Impromptus means that they don't suffer much from being grouped together in this way.

This disc was a charity shop buy made some seven or eight years ago. I afterwards found Vol. 1 too, albeit not drawn from the same series of re-issues: as shown by the latter being Kempff Plays Chopin - Volume 1; and the former Chopin – Piano Music Vol. 2. I believe the two are '66/'67 re-releases of recordings first issued in '58. The sound-quality is nothing special - a little veiled and distant - but there's nothing wrong with Kempff's pianism, and the music is beautiful.

The sleeve-notes are by Chopin expert Arthur Hedley and are informative, if decidedly old-school. Of the 'Impromptu No. 4 in C sharp minor, Op. 66', he writes, sniffily: "Although written when Chopin was twenty-four [...], this all-too-popular piece was not published until after his death. [...] Generations of schoolgirls have lavished on it 'torrents of approximate virtuosity', but a first-class performance can still bring out the enduring attractiveness of the music."

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Heat

Having acquired the soubriquet "the walrus of love", Barry White thereafter became something of a figure of fun, something that misled me (and presumably others) into disregarding his music. Only within the last few years have I begun to pay it more attention. After picking up a copy of his '74 album Can't Get Enough last summer, which I loved, I sought out some of the music by his protegés Love Unlimited. From a Discogs seller I ordered well-used copies of Under the Influence of... ('73) and In Heat ('74) for only £6.25. The only unappealing thing about In Heat is its awful title. The songs and the singing are strong; the arrangements rich & warmly enveloping. As one would expect from White, the thematic focus is firmly fixed on amatory matters. The opening number 'Move Me No Mountain' (the only one on the record not written by White) offers a refreshing rebuttal to the kind of lyrical hyperbole in songs like 'Ain't No Mountain High E...
Post a Comment
Read more

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more