Raff: Works for Piano & Orchestra

Idioma disponível: inglês

With yet another volume of her already many recordings of the work of Joachim Raff, British-Vietnamese pianist Tra Nguyen is now focusing her attention on works for piano and orchestra from the rather neglected composer. He is mostly known for having been Liszt’s personal assistant – a kind of factotum in reality – at the beginning of the 1850s. Many even think numerous orchestrations of some of Liszt’s greatest partitions are actually Raff’s work… In fact, the two men didn’t get along for long and Raff soon got his freedom back to focus on his own career as a composer and then as director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, in Germany. Here Tra Nguyen performs two of Raff’s three works for piano and orchestra. She starts with Ode au printemps (Ode to Spring), written in 1857 just a few months after leaving Weimar and you-know-who to get his freedom back: a remarkably free, ethereal piece, even though the clarity of its message hides an unlikely mastery of counterpoint and polyphony – one of Raff’s guilty pleasures. She then follows up with the Concerto of 1873, the work of maturity dedicated to von Bülow who created it on the piano that same year. The album closes with a world premiere recording of Caprice on Motifs from King Alfred, the King in question being one of Raff’s operas from the 1850s. For a long time, Raff indeed made a living as an arranger of Fantasies for piano from themes of famous operas – his own, but most often the ones of others – in a series published under the name of L’Opéra au salon. One must wonder however how a salon pianist, an amateur, would ever be able to master the uncanny virtuosity required to play this jewel. Tra Nguyen on the other hand passes it with flying colours! © SM/Qobuz