In this third and final volume of his complete recording of the Prokofiev Sonatas, Alexander Melnikov explores two highly contrasted facets of the young prodigy. The dazzling Sonatas No. 1 and No. 3 sweep aside the codes of the period, unlike the more enigmatic and eminently subtle Sonata No. 5, heard here in the revised version Prokofiev made in the last years of his life. In the coupling, the Visions fugitives, the Russian pianist realises to perfection the mixture of brilliance and poetry that gives this cycle its peculiar charm. © harmonia mundi

In the 22 months that passed between the release of Rosanne Cash's wonderfully articulated Rules of Travel and Black Cadillac, she became an orphan. She lost her stepmother, June Carter Cash, in May of 2003; her father, Johnny, passed away in September of that same year; and in May of 2005, her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, left this world as well. According to Cash, she began writing the songs for Black Cadillac in spring 2003 and ended in spring 2005. She began recording in November 2004. In other words, the album is the aural documentation of a process of grief, loss, and acceptance. And though her family was not the typical American family, this set is universal in its concepts. Certainly, it is an elegy; her father's presence is everywhere here. It is also more than that; it is a reckoning, with memory, anger, love, joy, grief, pain, and resolve. The set opens with Johnny's disembodied voice calling her: "Rosanne, c'mon." And the title track kicks into gear with a rumbling bass, a drum kit, and guitars emerging sparsely, surrounding her voice as she sings, "It was a black Cadillac/That drove you away...Now one of us gets to go to heaven/While one has to stay here in hell." The guitars explode into the mix, carrying the refrain, breaking open not only the tune, but her heart: "It was a black Cadillac/Like the one you used to drive/You were always rollin'/But the wheels burnt up your life/It's a black heart of pain I'm wearin'/That suits me just fine/'Cause there was nothin' I could do for you/While you were still alive." These lyrics, the swirling six strings, a funky Fender Rhodes, the crashing of drums, and the distant, tinny horns quoting their place in "Ring of Fire," as the track ends, while it opens up the focus of the rest of the disc -- it becomes the mission statement for the heart-rendering that follows.Cash has a history of searing honesty; Interiors and The Wheel are just two examples. But Black Cadillac engages it in a different way. She disguises nothing. There are no extended painterly metaphors. These are open and direct songs without self-pity, without artifice. Writing about her parents, she expresses regret, but doesn't ask for more time; there is only the open, unbowed humility of gratitude and the weight and burden of history, and experience that results in wisdom. In "I Was Watching You," she recounts her history from youth to age 50 with Johnny, and amid the atmospheric arrangements, she states plaintively, "Long after life/There is love." It's the crack in the record that becomes the catalyst for her search for meaning after these experiences. There are rockers, too, such as "Burn This Town Down," which struts its country, rock, and roots simultaneously. Yet it's all beside the point. From "God Is in the Roses," a nearly straight-up country tune that re-engages faith in God not as a concept, but as a place for the soul to find solace and rest in life's most difficult occurrences, the question of faith looms large on Black Cadillac. In "World Without Sound" she states, "I wish I was a Christian/And knew what to believe/I could learn a lot of rules/To put my mind at ease." "Like Fugitives" indicts religion -- and a few other things -- to a slippery trip-hop rhythm track and expresses anger purely and simply. The rocking "Dreams Are Not My Home" feels like it were written for Dire Straits. The poetic lyric is offered authoritatively against acoustic and electric guitars. This tune is a manifesto. Its refrain digs against the illusions of the past and the many temptations to escape the difficult present: "I want to live in the real world/I want to act like a real girl/I want to know I'm not alone/And that dreams are not my home." The bluesy country-rock in "House on the Lake" (referring to the old Cash home in Hendersonville, TN) evokes memory and the notion of place as a metaphor for passage and return. The guitars turn and wind around mandolin passages that underscore the determined declaration in Cash's voice.Cash has always been a pioneer and experimented freely. Since the release of 1990's Interiors, she has distanced herself -- on records -- from her family's country roots; in the process, she's carved a small niche in the nebulous adult alternative "genre." Black Cadillac shows the songwriter coming full circle without compromise. Her signature brand of country music has become part of her mix again. She has always employed rock and pop sounds even on her early outings. Cash embraces country here as a part of the sonic tapestry that includes every kind of music she's interested in. This set was recorded in Los Angeles with Bill Botrell (the odd numbered cuts) and in New York with husband-producer John Leventhal (the even numbered ones), and it's an album that CMT and even country radio can warm to. (This is interesting, because in 2006 the music the genre consciously employs and strives to include is something Cash helped to pioneer as far back as the 1980s.) This album is extraordinary. It is brave, difficult, and honest. It is utterly moving and beautiful. Because it so successfully marries all of her strengths as a songwriter, singer, and musician, Black Cadillac may be the crowning achievement of her career thus far.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

This French release is a percussion album in the widest sense; the instruments all can be struck, but as played by Joël Grare they are sounded in various ways, including bowing (as on the edge of a bell) or plucking (a Vietnamese jew's harp). The jew's harp appears in "Wu's Next," track 9, a section of one of the three multi-movement pieces on the disc. Except for the opening Follow, played on a set of eight tuned French cowbells plus a Middle Eastern camel bell and an Indian cymbal, these larger units are only loosely connected; the focus is on the individual sections, where the possibilities contained within an individual instrument or group of instruments are explored imaginatively and even spectacularly. "Wu's Next" is a good place to start in sampling the program. Its title refers both to Grare's choreographer/collaborator Wu Zheng (and it would indeed be a treat to experience this music along with its dance component) and to the Who's Next album by the rock group The Who. The rock allusion will become delightfully clear to the listener (refresh yourself with "Won't Get Fooled Again" if you weren't a rock & roller at the time), and the work also carries an acknowledgment of inspiration by U.S. minimalist Terry Riley (also the recipient of a dedication from Pete Townshend of The Who in the form of "Baba O'Riley"). It is the combination of abstract thoroughness and gleeful connections with other music that makes Grare's playing so attractive -- he surprises but never lets the music devolve into a series of shocks, and his music is highly approachable despite a generally unfamiliar and indeed self-generating musical language. Some of the connections come simply through the vast variety of instruments employed; Grare goes even beyond the array of percussion employed by Evelyn Glennie on some of her more adventurous albums to include, within the scope of a single section ("Seve'n'seg"), Japanese drums, a Chinese gong, cymbals, a Mozambican xylophone, a thumb piano, Syrian frame drums, "demon-scaring sticks" from Indonesia, and a Latin box drum. Rhythmic concepts from non-Western traditions are introduced in simple form to go with the drums that would normally embody them. A delightful and stimulating experience for percussion lovers, beautifully recorded.© TiVo

The third and last of the "war Sonatas", the Eighth Sonata was premiered by Emil Gilels in 1944. Serious and virtuosic, it is also the longest and, probably, the most "human" (Michel Hofmann) sonata by its author. The French-American pianist Nicholas Angelich gives a fascinating translation, with great fluidity, with much left unspoken, and a heightened sense of  poetic and dreamy sound. This album, which is wholly dedicated to Prokofiev is of a very high standard. Thanks to his exceptional technical mastery and his musical intelligence, Nicholas Angelich manages to reveal the infinite richness of a music too often known for its virtuosic side, which tends to be, under some fingers, quite brutal. The twenty pieces of Visions Fugitives unfold with a wide variety of refined, liquid and mysterious timbres. The performer's fine filigree work perfectly matches that of the composer in this beautiful recording that ends brilliantly with a selection of five pieces from the ballet Romeo and Juliet transcribed for the piano by the composer himself. The variety of the colours and the power of Angelich's piano would almost make us forget the orchestral magic of this famous score. © François Hudry/Qobuz

For his second album for the French label La Dolce Volta, following the magnificent “Album d'un voyageur” where he led us on a magnificent journey through Europe, travelling from Spain to Poland and exploring everything from the popular rhythms of Paul Ladmirault (Variations sur des airs de biniou) to Szymanowski’s Danses, here Florian Noack returns to Russian music - something which he has loved since his adolescence. Prokofiev has been haunting him since that age, when he watched the television broadcasts of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2003 and saw Prokofiev’s Second Concerto being performed by Severin von Eckardstein (who would later go on to win First Prize), marking a historic date in the history of the competition. With this new recording, Florian Noack composes a programme that alternates between relatively rare works (Tales of an old grandmother, Quatre Études, Op. 2) and more famous scores, in this case two absolute masterpieces of Prokofiev’s piano work. Composed between 1915 and 1917, the Visions fugitives form a catalogue of twenty short piano pieces inspired by the symbolist poet Constantin Balmont. The Belgian pianist’s interpretation is more tender and dreamy rather than sarcastic (Raekallio, Ondine 1989), worried (Gourari, ECM 2014, with her melancholic poignancy) or fierce (Mustonen, Decca). He concludes his recital with Piano Sonata No. 6, Op. 82, the first of the “war sonatas”, giving a performance with moderate but nevertheless firm contrasts. © Pierre- Yves Lascar/Qobuz

Taking Prokofiev's Visions fugitives as its starting point, this programme explores five contrasting universes of miniatures and presents a journey through the infinitely rich palette of the ephemeral. Liszt, Bartók, Chopin, Arzoumanov and Prokofiev revealed themselves in these short and sometimes apparently lightweight works, granting us access to their inner worlds, which each of us is free to explore through our own prism of the imagination. © Mirare