This is a Recording

Domenico Scarlatti is thought to have composed five hundred and fifty five keyboard sonatas in his time (1685-1757). None quite reach seven minutes' duration, so they're brief pieces - but there are so many. How best to approach this body of work? Some intrepid harpsichordists and pianists have recorded them all, with Scott Ross's complete set the first to be released, in 1988. Wonderful as they can be, I don't know that I'll ever want to try listening to every single one. A less serious alternative would be to try listening to them all at once . For me, the much more appealing option is to trust a performer to put together a judiciously-curated selection. As mentioned before , one of my first ever classical CD purchases was such a set, bringing together eighteen sonatas played by Andreas Staier. I'd picked the disc up having read an endorsement of Scarlatti in a poem: "It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti / condensed so much music into so few ...

At the age of five (ca. 1670), Élisabeth Jacquet, the daughter of an organist and music teacher, and something of a prodigy, was presented to King Louis XIV for whom she played the harpsichord and sang. She evidently made a favourable impression, as she was thereafter granted Royal patronage, and was in the privileged position of being able to dedicate her first published works, a collection of four suites for harpsichord issued in 1687, to the King. By that time she had married, taking the step (unusual in France at the time) of appending her husband's surname to her maiden name. Three of those four suites make up the bulk of this CD. Each suite brings together pieces sharing a common key, beginning with an "unmeasured" prelude, that is, one written without bar lines, with the player at liberty to set their own tempo. The subsequent pieces in each suite are all based on a set sequence of dances deemed proper at the time, beginning with an 'Allemande' and ending w...

One of the first few classical CDs I took a shine to, back in the mid-to-late '90s, was a disc of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas performed on harpsichord by Andreas Staier. For twenty years it was just about the only recording of baroque music I owned. Not long after turning fifty, it occurred to me to seek out some more compositions for harpsichord. Staier's name being one I knew, I looked up his other recordings, of which this one in particular caught my eye: ...pour passer la mélancolie , a 2013 release on the Harmonia Mundi label. It's an excellent recital, bringing together works by six different French and German composers dating from between the mid-17th century and the first decade of the 18th. It's loosely-themed around notions of melancholy: there are laments and tombeaux in commemoration of the departed, along with sombre passacaglias and other plaintive pieces. The disc's title comes from an opus by Johann Jacob Froberger supposedly written i...

The budget Brilliant Classics label issued the Complete Piano Sonatas of Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) on nine CDs between 2018 and '20. I have volumes three and four. The task was split between nine different performers, all of them playing on fortepianos, that is, on restored instruments dating from around the composer's heyday, or on modern copies made to emulate them: these having a different, more rinky-dink sound to a modern concert grand. On Volume Three, the fortepianist is Alexei Lubimov, a musician whose name I already knew well, whereas on Volume Four, Tuija Hakkila does the honours, a Finnish pianist whose name was new to me. To my mind, both musicians acquit themselves with similar distinction. The four pieces on this disc, all of them two-movment sonatas, date from several phases of Dussek's itenerant career, from 1788 when he was in pre-revolutionary Paris, to 1806-7, when he was based in Hamburg. My favorite of the four is the Op. 43 Sonata in A from 1800...

The first of Alexander Scriabin's works I heard were some of his heady, mystically-inclined, later piano sonatas - of those, I developed a particular fondness for the 'White Mass' Sonata (no. 7). After those, encountering his earlier, delicately Chopinesque compositions took me by surprise. Side A of the present LP contains Scriabin's set of 24 Preludes (Op. 11, 1896) which are obviously inspired by Chopin's famous Op. 28 set. Despite the likenesses of form and style, there are, meanwhile, enough dissimilarities to prevent their seeming mere pastiches. Even if they're collectively not quite up there with Chopin's pieces, they make for absorbing and enjoyable listening. Side B kicks off with the op. 28 'Fantasie' written in 1900, which is still determinedly "Romantic", albeit with as much of Liszt in its heavily sonorous chords as Chopin. The remaining works on the disc (the two Poèmes, Op.32 and eight Études, Op.42) date from 1903, when Sc...

While visiting the town of Kalmar in 2001, I bought a CD entitled Alina , on the ECM label: a beautifully soporific disc including a couple of performances, extended by improvisation, of Arvo Pärt's short piano piece 'Für Alina'. Was there other piano music by Pärt out there? All I could find was another short work ('Variationen Zur Gesundung Von Arinuschka') which I obtained on a CD, ordered on-line, called Pourquoi Je Suis Si Sentimental . This disc, of 'Post-Avant-Garde Piano Music From The Ex-Soviet Union' turned out to be a real discovery - an eye-opener - my first introduction to the work of composers like Alexander Rabinovitch, Georgs Pelēcis & Valentin Silvestrov; all performed by the pianist Alexei Lubimov. Looking for more music by these composers (and for more of Lubimov's playing), led me to Der Bote , another ECM release, one with a loosely elegaic theme. The album's title (and the title of the piece by Silvestrov that closes the rec...

This is a 1962 performance by Alfred Brendel of Franz Schubert's Impromptus, Op. 90 & Op. 142 on a 1969 UK re-issue. Of Brendel, who would have been 31 at the time of the recording, the sleeve-notes say "he shows a particular preference for Mozart, and has been instrumental in bringing before the public unjustly neglected Schubert Sonatas" whereas nowadays he's probably best-known for his esteemed interpretations of the Beethoven Sonatas.   After a paragraph about Brendel, the notes, by an un-named author, discuss the Impromptus in some detail. Despite the unalike opus numbers assigned to the two groupings of four pieces, they were apparently all written in the same year: 1827. "These eight pieces", the sleeve-noter adds, "were the outcome of publishers' urgings and requests for 'short pieces, not too difficult, and in easy keys'". The term Impromptu is misleading here, we're told. with the pieces being "anything but imp...

I only seldom visit Cardiff, but when I do, the Oxfam Books and Music shop on St. Mary's Street is somewhere I'll try to look around if time permits. They often have interesting classical LPs in stock: for instance, I picked up this album, plus a disc with Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden' quartet on it for about £6 or £7 last summer. François Couperin's Premier Livre De Piéces De Clavecin was published in 1713, comprising five 'orders' (or suites) of pieces each of which shared a common key. This disc contains the Cinquiême Ordre in its entirety, that is the fifth (and last) of the 'orders' in that first book, which is in the key of A. These are prefaced by a 'Prélude', the fifth of eight presented in Couperin's 1716 treatise L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin . This is a 1980 recording on the Astrée label, performed by Blandine Verlet on a 1716 harpsichord made in Lyon by Pierre Donzelague. Lyon was also the venue for the recording....

In the course of an otherwise unfruitful visit to a dingy junkshop on Pantarholmen, Karlskrona, ca. 2002, I picked up an odd-looking double album called The Lund - St. Petri Symphony by Lubomyr Melnyk. I found it wasn't a symphony in any conventional sense, but rather piano music: extended compositions comprising patterns of rapid arpeggios, what its originator termed "music in the continuous mode". I enjoyed the album a good deal and went on-line in search of more information - but at that time there wasn't much of it to be found. I did, however, stumble upon a forum post giving a (snail-mail) address where Melnyk might be contacted. I wrote him a letter, having gathered it would be possible to order records from him directly - which proved to be the case. The Song of Galadriel was one of the three LPs I obtained that way. The album, recorded and released in 1985 consists of two long tracks, one per side: 'Legend' and the titular 'Song of Galadriel'...

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 be...

Another week, another album valled Vertigo . This one combines selections of 18th-century pieces for harpsichord composed by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Pancrace Royer, and performed by Jean Rondeau. It's one of several CDs of harpsichord works I bought in 2019 having resolved to expand my hitherto very limited knowledge of 'Baroque' music a little.   It's a wonderful album, with spirited playing and vivid recorded sound. Rondeau was apprently only twenty-two at the time of the recording , with his beard yet to attain its subsequent grandeur . I enjoy it all, with the dramatic title track and 'La Marche des Scythes' (both by Royer) among the highlights. Rondeau contributes a lyrical essay to the CD booklet, outlining his rationale for selecting and ordering the various pieces as he did. There's also a short piece by Philippe Charles about the renowned antique instrument used, and about the Château d'Assas, the venue for the recording. As is commonplace on...

This is an album of classical lullabies, berceuses , wiegenlieder performed by the French pianist Bertrand Chamayou. My copy is on vinyl, and was a Christmas gift - specifically for the strange Christmas of 2020. Its sixteen tracks include such old chestnuts as Brahms's 'Wiegenlied' (as transcribed for solo piano by Max Reger) and Chopin's op. 57 'Berceuse'. Besides these familiar melodies there are some delightful pieces plucked from the dustier corners of the repertoire composed by the likes of Janáček, Lyapunov, Villa-Lobos, Busoni, Martinů, Balakirev and Alkan; but only a single very short work by a female composer: 'La Toute Petite s'endort' ("The Little Girl Falls Asleep") by Mel Bonis. There's also a single piece of mid-20th-Century atonality in the shape of Helmut Lachenmann's 'Wiegenmusik', which, while it doesn't blend quite seamlessly with the pieces of honeyed romanticism either side of it; neither does it f...

Johann Sebastian Bach is widely revered as the best of all composers, and is frequently praised in the most extravagant terms. His second Partita for solo violin, and, in particular, the long 'Chaconne' which closes it, has further been singled out as one of his profoundest creations. In the unlikely event of this blog attracting any readers (even the bots have moved on elsewhere, it seems), they will find further confirmation here - if any were needed - that my taste is defective and not to be trusted: I don't much care for J.S. Bach's music. The BWV 1004 'Chaconne' is a partial exception to that rule: I have found it absorbing and impressive on the occasions I've listened to it, but those occasions have been few. I bought this 10" disc of a mid-'50s mono recording of it by Viennese fiddler Wolfgang Schneiderhan nearly twenty years ago, but have only seldom blown the dust off it. Other Bach pieces I don't mind include his Concerto for Two Violi...

Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1699-1782) was a virtuoso violist who, in 1747, published a set of compositions for viola da gamba and accompaniment, ostensibly by his late father Antoine, who had also been an esteemed virtuoso. Forqueray fils subsequently published the same pieces in arrangements for the harpsichord, and two suites of these re-arranged pieces constitute the main meat of this CD.  The specifics of the works' attribution are altogether unclear. Jean-Baptiste took sole credit for a handful of the pieces, and for all of their 'continuo' bass lines, but, it has been argued that the majority of the music may have been his. Father and son had had a difficult relationship, to say the least, and Forqueray jr .'s motives when posthumously disseminating his father's work need not have been pure homage. Aside from that, it has been suggested that the harpsichord arrangements may have been the handiwork of Mme Marie-Rose Forqueray, Jean-Baptiste's second wife, wh...

I didn't take the time to listen though all of Beethoven's piano sonatas until I was in my mid-forties. Some I already knew, but I was unfamiliar with the majority. I found I liked more of them than not, which led me to ponder acquiring a box-set of the things. The one that was on offer at Amazon at an advantageous price at the right time was the not-quite-complete nine-disc set performed by Emil Gilels, who'd recorded twenty-seven of the thirty-two sonatas before his sudden death in 1985. I'd seen Gilels' name mentioned as being among the finest of 20th-Century pianists, and knew his Beethoven cycle was highly-rated by many aficionados. It's not hard for even a know-nothing listener like me to be impressed by his playing on such old chestnuts as the 'Appassionata' or 'Waldstein' sonatas (nos. 21 & 23 respectively), and, more generally, he seldom fails to please when the notes are flying thick & fast. In no. 14 ('Moonlight'), the ...