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J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations
Víkingur Ólafsson
Classical - Released October 6, 2023 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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Qobuz Album of the Week
Complete recordings of great works such as Bach’s sonatas, his “Well-Tempered Clavier,” or Chopin’s “24 Preludes” occupy a unique place within the history of musical recording. It’s in their entirety that they are most unique and powerful, whereas in the purity of their repertoire, individual pieces are generally regarded as being largely heterogeneous. These timeless compositions transcend their authors and are given new life with each interpretation, and such is the case with Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Published in 1741, as the fourth and last part of his Clavier-Übung, the “Goldberg Variations” still remain, almost 300 years later, amongst the baroque master’s most important works, not only for the history of musical composition and recording in general (Glenn Gould, Trevor Pinnock, Rosalyn Tureck, and many others come to mind), but also for Víkingur Ólafsson in particular. “I’ve been dreaming of recording this work for 25 years,” says the Icelandic pianist, thus confirming that these studies are more a life’s work than a whim.Beginning with a melody that’s simple in appearance, the work is spread over a total of 30 variations, becoming a masterpiece of complexity. Determined, at surface level, by a rigid formal framework, the material itself nevertheless demands a “sort of interpretive improvisation”. Ólafsson recognises this paradox and makes it his own not by interpreting the different variations with technical precision and a strict loyalty to the metronome, but rather by following cyclical impulses and organic interpretation. At the same time, he evolves with the work and transcends it, whether in the creativity of the fugues or the complexity of the different canons, which influence one another, rely on one another, and, finally, like a parabola, return to the first melody and the beginning of all that had transpired previously - like the ebb and flow of the Icelandic ocean, whose waves we know will always return to shore, but whose calm or strength we can never be sure of. © Lena Germann/Qobuz
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Rachmaninoff: The Piano Concertos & Paganini Rhapsody
Yuja Wang
Classical - Released September 1, 2023 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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It’s almost as if Yuja Wang were playing at home in her second collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The music of Rachmaninov has no secrets left for the Chinese piano virtuoso, who strolls happily along these formidably difficult concertos. It’s the “Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18”, the most iconic, that leads. Composed in 1901, at the time when Rachmaninov was just beginning to recover from the depression caused by the failure of his first symphony, this concerto became one of the centrepieces of the Russian composer’s work, when it was notoriously sampled in the legendary pop hit “All by myself”. Yuja Wang moves with alarming ease along a score rife with traps, starting with the tenth intervals that are every pianist’s worst nightmare. Wang offers a sublime variety in her playing, marvellously befitting of the very distinct moods of the three movements: raging and bold attacks in the “moderato”, languid legatos in the “adagio sostenuto”, and finishing with a triumphant and luminous “allegro scherzando”. “Concertos No. 1” and “No.4” are served with the same mastery, and the album closes with a “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” where the orchestra proves to be of tremendous precision. An impeccable record. © Pierre Lamy/Qobuz
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CLOSURE / CONTINUATION. LIVE. AMSTERDAM 07/11/22
Porcupine Tree
Rock - Released December 8, 2023 | Music For Nations
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Bruckner: 11 Symphonies
Christian Thielemann
Symphonies - Released October 13, 2023 | Sony Classical
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Fauré: Nocturnes & Barcarolles
Marc-André Hamelin
Classical - Released September 1, 2023 | Hyperion
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The virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin isn't the first pianist one would think of when it comes to Fauré's music, but he has recorded all kinds of things, even ragtime, and as it happens, he does quite well with the dense miniatures heard on this album. Fauré's Nocturnes are at some level connected to Chopin's but are quite different, with murky chromaticism, especially in the later ones, setting the night atmosphere. Fauré is thought of as a musical conservative, but one would hardly know it from the pieces here that stubbornly refuse to settle on a tonal center. The counterpoint is complex, and a successful performance is one that untangles it. There isn't big, pianistic virtuosity here, but Hamelin's ability to balance Fauré's registers is virtuosic in its own way. The Barcarolles, a genre not much pursued by other composers but for Fauré seeming to allow rays of Venetian sunshine into his rather closed-in French world, are lighter but basically cut from the same cloth. Things lighten up with the final Dolly Suite, Op. 56, where Hamelin performs with his wife, Cathy Fuller. (For those wondering, neither Mi-a-ou nor the Kitty-valse has anything to do with cats.) Although Hyperion's church sound is not idiomatic, it does not damage the remarkable clarity in what is a significant entry in the Fauré discography, one that landed on classical best-seller lists in the late summer of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Live from The Cliburn - Liszt: Transcendental Etudes
Yunchan Lim
Classical - Released July 7, 2023 | Steinway and Sons
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The teenage pianist Yunchan Lim has gotten reams (or gigabytes) of good press, yet listeners may have any number of reasons for being skeptical. Lim's K-pop looks are not everyone's cup of tea, and on his debut album, while showing plenty of promise, he seemed oddly reluctant to take the spotlight. Any doubts, however, will be put to rest by Lim's performances, recorded here, in his winning career in the 2022 Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth, Texas. They are astonishing. Competition performances often have a well-practiced, safe quality, but not this one; Lim goes out onto the edge and stays there. Sample at will, and note that he tends to give quieter passages an almost harsh quality; his method is to raise the tension, which he knows he can dissipate in brilliant, tumultuous passagework. What's more, he accomplishes these utterly distinctive performances in Liszt's Transcendental Etudes, often-recorded works that are commonplace in the competition repertory. The title of this collection is slightly mistranslated from its French original, Études d'exécution transcendante ("Etudes of Transcendental Execution"). The original points up the degree to which, for all the storm and thunder, these are true etudes, posing specific technical problems for the player, and Lim sets the rigorous and the fantastic elements against each other brilliantly. One need only add that Steinway's live sound is superlative. Everything one has heard is true, and this album made classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2022.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Debussy: Études & Pour le piano
Steven Osborne
Solo Piano - Released November 3, 2023 | Hyperion
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Gramophone: Recording of the Month
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Rachmaninov Variations
Daniil Trifonov
Classical - Released June 15, 2015 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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5 Sterne Fono Forum Klassik
The long-awaited new album from Daniil Trifonov is finally here! It comes fully dedicated to the music of Rachmaninoff, and, more specifically, to his three cycles of variations for piano. First of all, we have the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, a late work composed in the summer of 1934, which stands as one of Rachmaninoff’s great scores, alongside the Third Symphony, The Bells, the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom , and the Symphonic Dances. For this recording the Philadelphia Orchestra, working under the leadership of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, focus on the young Russian virtuoso with rapt attention, who then proceeds with another of the Russian composer’s great cycles, the underappreciated Variations on a Theme by Chopin , whose main theme resumes on the opening bars of the 20th Prelude of Op. 28, in C minor. Rachmaninoff designs from a highly polyphonic basis a work of rare complexity, and shape, through its harmonies. He has Chopin in mind, of course, for his lyrical side (Variations 6 and 21), but also J.S Bach (Variation 1), and Schumann – for the big Finale – whose epic touch ghosts the Symphonic Studies Op. 13. This partition, which allowed Trifonov to remove some passages, is believed by some performers to be an immense lyric poem in which notes turn literally into words (notably Jorge Bolet, and his magical phrasing, for Decca in 1986!). Others wish to unify it, like the young Trifonov himself, whose gesture is aimed primarily at a sense of fluidity. After a relatively brief, bright, tribute to Rachmaninov composed by the pianist himself, the album closes with the famous Variations on a Theme by Corelli, which is in fact the theme of "La Follia", which was used ceaselessly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all over Europe. © Qobuz
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Bach: Goldberg Variations Reimagined
Rachel Podger
Classical - Released October 20, 2023 | Channel Classics
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One may well wonder why (or whether) a non-keyboard version of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, arguably at the apex of the entire tradition of keyboard music, is at all needed. However, Baroque violinist Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque member Chad Kelly, who "reimagined" the work (arranged is not a strong enough word), offer several justifications for their deployment of the Variations across various kinds of chamber music here. "Despite what many respected and respectful commentators have propagated," Kelly says, "it is not a sacrosanct work of pure, absolute and abstract art." Kelly seeks to use the varied settings to clarify Bach's counterpoint, to examine the musical influences that were in the air when Bach wrote the work, and to "be idiomatic to the historical instruments used in its performance and to the individual styles and genres referenced in the work." All this involves rewriting certain passages. That is a lot to ask, but generally, Kelly and Podger make it work. There are just 18 tracks, with several variations often combined into a little suite. This tends to deemphasize the tripartite structure of the variations, with a canon every third variation. Listeners can make up their own mind about that, but most will be impressed enough by the smooth Baroque winds in the slower variations, especially the crucial Adagio Variation 26, that they will be won over by this unorthodox effort. This release made classical best-seller charts in the autumn of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos Nos. 1-4, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Vladimir Ashkenazy
Classical - Released January 1, 2014 | Decca Music Group Ltd.
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Parallel Lines
Blondie
Pop - Released September 1, 1978 | Chrysalis\EMI Records (USA)
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Blondie turned to British pop producer Mike Chapman for their third album, on which they abandoned any pretensions to new wave legitimacy (just in time, given the decline of the new wave) and emerged as a pure pop band. But it wasn't just Chapman that made Parallel Lines Blondie's best album; it was the band's own songwriting, including Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, and James Destri's "Picture This," and Harry and Stein's "Heart of Glass," and Harry and new bass player Nigel Harrison's "One Way or Another," plus two contributions from nonbandmember Jack Lee, "Will Anything Happen?" and "Hanging on the Telephone." That was enough to give Blondie a number one on both sides of the Atlantic with "Heart of Glass" and three more U.K. hits, but what impresses is the album's depth and consistency -- album tracks like "Fade Away and Radiate" and "Just Go Away" are as impressive as the songs pulled for singles. The result is state-of-the-art pop/rock circa 1978, with Harry's tough-girl glamour setting the pattern that would be exploited over the next decade by a host of successors led by Madonna.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo
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Mozart Piano Concertos 11, 12, & 13
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
Symphonies - Released March 8, 2024 | Chandos
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The "Mozart, Made in Manchester" series from pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and the Manchester Camerata under conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy has been a joy from the start. It is not that Bavouzet does anything so radical. He plays a modern piano, although there is an overall sparse approach that probably traces itself to the historical performance movement. These are just impressively sensitive performances that bring out the individuality of each work. Here, Bavouzet takes on three Mozart concertos from the early years of his life in Vienna as he broke free from the stultifying circumstances he had experienced in Salzburg. These three piano concertos are brimming over with formal experimentation that Bavouzet brings out in full; sample the tempo-shifting Rondeau finale of the Piano Concerto No. 13 in C major, K. 415. The Manchester Camerata, with some youthful musicians taken on from the city's Chetham's School, offers lively playing that conductor Takács-Nagy calibrates beautifully to Bavouzet's detailed readings. Releases in this series have included a Mozart overture, and here, one gets a vigorous, almost rollicking Overture to Die Entführung aus dem Serail, K. 384, which emphasizes the battery of Turkish percussion in the piece. This unusually satisfying Mozart recording made classical best-seller lists in early 2024.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Grieg : Complete Orchestral Works
Bjarte Engeset
Classical - Released May 8, 2014 | Naxos
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5 de Diapason
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Liszt: Piano Sonata & Transcendental Etudes
Francesco Piemontesi
Solo Piano - Released September 1, 2023 | PentaTone
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To hear pianist Francesco Piemontesi tell it, he waited until middle age to attempt the Liszt Transcendental Etudes, even though these works are often programmed by hotshot young pianists intent on displaying their technical mastery. What Piemontesi gets is that Liszt's most difficult works have technical depths that are still achieved by only a few. A piece like "Scarbo," from Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit, was at the edge of the technically possible when it was written, but now any competent conservatory graduate can play it. The Transcendental Etudes and the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor are different. A good performance is quite possible, but great ones that evoke the spell in which Liszt held his audiences are rarer. The latter is what the music gets here from Piemontesi. He is strong throughout, but it is in the dense virtuosic passages, with sheets of sound issuing from his piano, unfortunately unidentified in the booklet, that leave the listener amazed. Sample "Mazeppa" from the Etudes or the fugal treatment of the main sonata material for an idea; those sheets of sound never lose their individual notes. Piemontesi is hardly less effective in the slower passages, which have a kind of majesty. He records on home ground at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, and it is an appropriate venue for his remarkable achievement.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Debut Recital
Martha Argerich
Classical - Released January 1, 1995 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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The Qobuz Ideal Discography
Oxygene Trilogy
Jean Michel Jarre
Techno - Released December 2, 2016 | Sony Music Catalog
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Shostakovich : Symphonies Nos. 4 & 11 "The Year 1905"
Andris Nelsons
Symphonies - Released July 6, 2018 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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5 de Diapason -
Gramophone Editor's Choice -
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Grammy Awards
Clocking in at over an hour for the Fourth, and almost an hour for the Eleventh or "1905", these are the two longest and fullest of Shostakovich's symphonies. What's remarkable is that the Fourth, finished in 1936, was only performed in 1961 – eleven years after the performance of the Eleventh in 1957! It was in 1936 that the poor composer felt a bullet whistle by him, following an infamous article in Pravda, dictated by Stalin: "Chaos in Place of Music", which torpedoed the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: the work was carefully locked away, only to be brought back out once the dictator was dead, buried and comprehensively decomposed. You can see where the composer was coming from! The tone of this Fourth hasn't the slightest hint of optimism, We hear dark Mahlerian accents, desperate flights and tortured harmonies: not exactly the music of a bright tomorrow. The Eleventh, structured according to a "political" programme, celebrating the revolutionaries of 1905 and the tragic events of Bloody Sunday – when the Russian army fired on a crowd, killing 96 according to official sources and several thousand according to others – with a much more optimistic tone, although we know what optimism means in the world of Shostakovich. The two symphonies were recorded at public concerts, in autumn 2017 and spring 2018 respectively by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and their conductor Andris Nelsons. © SM/Qobuz
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Shostakovich & Kondrashin: Complete Symphonies
Kirill Kondrashin
Classical - Released January 1, 2006 | JSC Firma Melodiya
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From Sleep
Max Richter
Classical - Released September 4, 2015 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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An hour-long distillation of the eight-hour Sleep, From Sleep was designed by Max Richter to be listened to while awake (he intended the original to enhance a full night's rest and even consulted a neuroscientist about the different phases of sleep). Focusing on some of the work's most actively lovely moments, From Sleep still retains the feeling of an exquisite lullaby. These soft, gliding compositions for piano, strings, electronics and vocals encourage listeners to slow down and reflect in a hectic world, and do so with the same the same aching-yet-inspiring beauty that has graced Richter's work since The Blue Notebooks.© TiVo
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Nicholas Angelich: Hommage
Nicholas Angelich
Classical - Released September 1, 2023 | Warner Classics
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Pianist Nicholas Angelich, even more admired in Europe than in his native U.S., passed away tragically early in 2022 at the age of 51. One way to look at this Hommage is to note that it took quite a bit of research power, much of it apparently donated, to put together this massive seven-volume tribute, assembled from live performances and radio broadcasts between 1995 and 2019. That is a lot of Angelich, but fans here will find much that sheds new light on his genius. Consider the Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 24, which Angelich rarely played in concert. It receives a wonderfully controlled performance in which the tricky architecture of this work comes to the surface. Angelich was a fine virtuoso, and the Liszt Transcendental Etudes and the big Russian works generally have a layer of excitement added by the live performance. However, Angelich is equally effective in subtler pieces, thoughtful in the likes of Zemlinsky and the Bach Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, where the sequence of events feels somewhat different from in the pianist's 2011 studio recording even as the über-Romantic slow tempos are retained. His opening aria is even slower than on the studio version. The mastering of these immensely diverse sound sources from Erato is as good as such a thing can be, and physical album buyers get some fine reflections on the pianist's work. This is, in short, an effective tribute to a pianist whose life and work were brutally cut short.© James Manheim /TiVo
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