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37ème Festival International de Piano de La Roque d'Anthéron
Iddo Bar-Shaï
Classical - Released July 14, 2017 | Mirare
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Glinka: Chamber music, Vol. 1
Mikhail Glinka
Classical - Released February 24, 2008 | Suoni e Colori
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Bach : Contemplation
Anne Queffélec
Classical - Released January 8, 2009 | Mirare
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The Janacek Album
Aldo Ciccolini
Classical - Released April 4, 2006 | Soupir Editions - DN
These are lovely, even heartfelt performances of two little-known masterpieces by a master pianist that have only one serious flaw. It's not the playing. Aldo Ciccolini has more than enough technique to blaze through Janácek's tremendously difficult music, more than enough sensitivity to soar through his passionate lyricism, more than enough sense of tempo to drive his gnomic rhythms, and more than enough clarity of purpose to elucidate his gnarly textures. And it's certainly not the music. Although Janácek was widely considered an ethnic eccentric for a good part of his career, his music, especially his operas, long ago assumed its place in the standard repertoire, and in Ciccolini's hands even his sometimes enigmatic piano music is as compelling, even as compulsive, as Debussy's at its most obsessive. The flaw, however, is not with Ciccolini's hands but with his feet, specifically, with his pedaling. It's not his pedaling per se -- his subtle gradations of tone and nuanced blends of tone are wonderfully evocative -- it's the sound of his pedaling. Whenever the music is quieter than fortissimo, one can hear his pedals rising and falling -- and Janácek's piano music is quieter than fortissimo most of the time. The sound of the piano itself is more than adequate, if not quite exemplary -- a little too distant sometimes and a little too close other times -- but the nearly incessant sound of Ciccolini's pedaling could drive some listeners mad.© TiVo
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Poulenc : Pièces pour Piano
Alexandre Tharaud
Classical - Released October 15, 1996 | Arion
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Grand Prix de l'Académie Charles Cros
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Alexander Scriabin : Intégrale des Etudes pour piano
Andrei Korobeinikov
Solo Piano - Released October 6, 2014 | Mirare
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4 étoiles Classica
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Schubert: Divertissement à la hongroise
Zhu Xiao-Mei
Classical - Released January 31, 2003 | harmonia mundi
Schubert . Impromptus
Philippe Cassard
Classical - Released January 1, 2008 | Universal Music Division Decca Records France
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Soliszt
Dimitri Naïditch
Contemporary Jazz - Released December 9, 2022 | Dinaï Records
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Chopin, Schubert & Prokofiev
Yulianna Avdeeva
Classical - Released September 8, 2014 | Mirare
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Récital à Saint-Frambourg: Couperin, Rameau, Marais & Daquin
Gyorgy Cziffra
Classical - Released April 22, 2022 | Warner Classics
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Brahms: Piano Works (Klavierstücke Op. 76, Intermezzi Op. 117, etc.)
Adam Laloum
Classical - Released January 18, 2011 | Mirare
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La dynastie des Couperin
André Isoir
Sacred Vocal Music - Released January 1, 1987 | Tempéraments - Radio France
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4 étoiles Classica
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Récital de Besançon, 7 septembre 1956
Clara Haskil
Classical - Released June 27, 2001 | INA Mémoire vive
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Le chant du violoncelle
Edouardo Torbianelli
Classical - Released November 20, 2020 | Paraty
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Chopin and Franchomme’s collaboration and sincere friendship rested on a double understanding : they were linked both by a communion of feeling, so precious to the Polish exile in the Paris mondain of the time, and an artistic symbiosis that fed both on an affinity in the mastery of their instrument, and on the sharing of such basic musical values as authenticity, simplicity, elegance, and nobility of expression. Edoardo Torbianelli and Fernando Caida-Greco first played together in 2000 as a trio formation, with the violinist Amandine Beyer, within the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Their collaboration led to a musical dialogue based on extensive research, with a particular focus on the Romantic repertoire, revisited in the light of the aesthetic and technical knowledge acquired over 20 years of research. © Paraty
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Debussy – Rameau
Víkingur Ólafsson
Classical - Released March 27, 2020 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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5 étoiles de Classica
This program brings together two great French composers, separated by almost two centuries, that we would not think of bringing together spontaneously. But the freedom of mind of the Icelandic pianist looks at it otherwise, who, for his third album with Deutsche Grammophon, wanted to highlight their affinities as their contrasts in the light of their innovative contribution to the musical thought of their time. "I scratch my head wondering why Rameau's music is not played more. Between quality, inventiveness and unpredictability, there is never any element of formula in these pieces”, says Víkingur Ólafsson. By instinctively associating these style characteristics with those specific to Debussy, he decided to make an album of them: "I want to show Rameau as a futurist and underline the deep roots of Debussy in French baroque — and in Rameau's music in particular. The idea is that the listener almost forgets who is who by listening to the album." Debussy, who never stopped defending the French tradition by opposing it to German music, liked the decorative and complex lines of this Baroque composer with a French spirit like his own.An initial idea in the development of this skillfully constructed program, the transcription for piano of Debussy from Prélude to his Cantata La Damoiselle introduces it. Like the album's visual, Víkingur Ólafsson aims to be suggestive even in the accent he gives in Rameau to polyphonic voices supported by a flawless rhythmic impulse, which contrasts with Debussy, whose among other things the beautiful tumultuous Jardins sous la pluie which is played with a large breath in the image of wind load until the light returns. © Qobuz / GG
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Hamelin: New Piano Works
Marc-André Hamelin
Classical - Released February 2, 2024 | Hyperion
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Marc-André Hamelin, by general acclaim, one of the great virtuosos of the day, here attempts to recapture the compositional as well as technical spirit of the pianistic giants of the past. Liszt, of course, was a pianist-composer, but he was not the only one. Hamelin issued an album of his own etudes in 2010, but in these "New Piano Works," mostly composed during the 2010s, he is even more adventurous. Many of these works are variations of one kind or another, and Hamelin starts off with his own Variations on a Theme of Paganini, previously essayed by Liszt, Rachmaninov, and several others. These variations introduce not only the usual high level of virtuosity but also the eclectic range of references in most of these works; he quotes Rachmaninov's set and also alludes to Alkan, Chopin, Brahms, and others. The variation form is ideal for Hamelin's project, for he can drop in quotations and allusions the same as a 19th century virtuoso would. His Variations diabellique sur des thèmes de Beethoven is a wickedly humorous exegesis on Beethoven's Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120. There are hints of jazz in some of Hamelin's variations, and these flower fully in the Suite à l'ancienne, which annotator Francis Pott proposes as a tribute to the jazz-classical fusionist Nikolai Kapustin; he composed a similar Suite in the Old Style. Hamelin concludes with an explosive Toccata on l'Homme Armé, the medieval tune that served as the basis for numerous Renaissance masses. So Hamelin's range of references is wide, but it is never random, and the listener who missed the subtler allusions will still enjoy the music. This is a bold, highly entertaining re-creation of the role of the classic virtuoso, idiomatically and clearly recorded at London's Henry Wood Hall. This release made classical best-seller lists in early 2024.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Ravel: L'Œuvre pour piano
Philippe Bianconi
Solo Piano - Released September 15, 2023 | La Dolce Volta
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Ravel's piano works include some of the most popular keyboard pieces of the 20th century, so pianist Philippe Bianconi has plenty of competition for this double-album complete cycle. Of course, one advantage of the complete set is that it can include the less common pieces like Ravel's musical impressions of Borodin and Chabrier and the Menuet en Ut dièse mineur ("Minuet in C sharp minor"). These lesser-known works, mostly miniatures, fit Bianconi's style beautifully; he is a precise, concise player who brings out Ravel's considerable rhythmic subtlety. His Ravel performances tap into a long French tradition stretching back to Robert Casadesus and his wife, Gaby, who was one of Bianconi's teachers. Imbued with the French conservatory values of clarity and restraint, Bianconi sacrifices mood for clean execution. In Le Tombeau de Couperin, he is wonderful, one of the very best available, catching the ways Ravel stretches the Baroque rhythms in a really uncanny way. Many pianists can handle the technical challenges of Gaspard de la nuit these days, but few can seem as effortless while doing so. In music that depends more on extramusical references, such as the four-hand Ma mère l'Oye (recorded with Clément Lefebvre), some listeners may want a bit more color, while others will find Bianconi's approach bracing and fresh, with an evocative Miroirs. Sample several different works. Most listeners will agree that the La Dolce Volta label's sound, from the Grande Salle at the Metz Arsenal, is ideal for the music and the music-making here.
© James Manheim /TiVo
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Offenbach: La Princesse de Trébizonde
Paul Daniel
Opera - Released September 22, 2023 | Opera Rara
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Gramophone: Recording of the Month
The Opera Rara label and company, true to their name, resurrect forgotten operas. There is an abundance of those in the output of Jacques Offenbach, who wrote some 100 operettas and opéras bouffes, few of which are remembered today. Opera Rara made a good pick with La Princesse de Trébizonde (1869), and this release made classical best-seller charts in the autumn of 2023. Offenbach is as full of good, Arthur Sullivan-like tunes as ever, and he even discarded a number of them from the operetta's original production in Baden-Baden in the process of preparing a new version for Paris. Those discarded pieces are included here, and there could hardly be a better testimony to Offenbach's melodic fecundity. Better still is the action, taking place in a carnival sideshow and suggesting all kinds of ideas for a production set in modern times. It is gloriously preposterous even by operetta standards. A girl, Zanetta, accidentally breaks the nose off a wax figure of the Princess of Trébizonde and agrees to stand in for the figure herself. A prince (a pants role) -- who has dropped a lottery ticket into the till in lieu of paying admission -- falls in love with the "Princess." Meanwhile, the lottery ticket, with a castle as the prize, comes up a winner and overturns the relationships between rich and poor. The comic scenes thus spawned are handled with the needed high spirits by the cast and the several choruses (executed by Opera Rara's remarkable house chorus), and conductor Paul Daniel is ideal in this genre, consistently pushing the tempo just slightly in order to bring the forward momentum. This recording is based on a 2022 London production but is a "cast recording," not a live one, and it is quite clear sonically. La Princesse de Trébizonde has been recorded only twice before, once in Russian (!) and once for French radio in 1966; this sprightly performance is much needed.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Écho & Narcisse
Hervé Niquet
Classical - Released August 25, 2023 | Château de Versailles Spectacles
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