Cameron Crozman / Philip Chiu TAPEO

 

TAPEO

 

Sylvia-Elisabeth Viertel / Andreas Frölich SCHUMANN - GRANADOS - PIAZZOLLA - REVUELTAS - SCHUBERT

 

 

SCHUMANN - GRANADOS - PIAZZOLLA - REVUELTAS - SCHUBERT

Naoko Yoshino / Marie-Pierre Langlamet DANSES

 

DANSES

 

Teo Gheorghiu DUENDE

 

DUENDE

David Greilsammer LABYRINTH

 

LABYRINTH

 

Núria Rial / Edin Karamazov CON GUITARRA

 

CON GUITARRA

 

LES MUSIQUES DE PICASSO

LES MUSIQUES DE PICASSO

 

Andrew Blanch / Ariel Nurhadi ALCHEMY

ALCHEMY

 

Alissa Zoubritski TRANSCRIPTIONS LYRIQUES

TRANSCRIPTIONS LYRIQUES

Marianne Lambert MÉLODIES PASSAGÈRES

MÉLODIES PASSAGÈRES

Tabea Zimmermann / Javier Perianes CANTILENA

                                                                    CANTILENA

Martin James Bartlett LOVE AND DEATH

Since his 2014 victory in BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, Martin James Bartlett has built a considerable international reputation. Love and Death, with its imaginatively conceived programme, gives proof of his artistic range.

"I'm absolutely thrilled to have signed with Warner Classics and to release my debut album Love and Death,” he says. “These are two elemental themes that have inspired breathtaking masterpieces from poets and composers for centuries. My album will feature gloriously beautiful music by Bach, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt and Granados, culminating with an impassioned and fiery 'War' Sonata of Prokofiev and I can't wait to share it with everyone."

In creating the programme, Bartlett’s starting point was Liszt’s transcription of Schumann’s passionate song ‘Widmung’ (‘Dedication’), set to a poem by Friedrich Rückert. “It is a love song that also speaks of death,” he explains, “and it concludes with a quote from Schubert’s Ave Maria, introducing the idea of heavenly love.” These themes are explored throughout the album.

Mengla Huang / Xuefei Yang MILONGA DEL ANGEL

Mengla Huang is one of the most active violinists of our time. His brilliant technique and unique interpretations have fascinated audiences throughout Asia, Europe and North America. In 2002, he won the first prize at the prestigious Paganini International Violin Competition in Italy, where he was also awarded the Renato De Barbieri Memorial award for the best interpretation of Paganini's caprices and the Mario Ruminelli Memorial award.

Xuefei Yang is acclaimed as one of the world’s finest classical guitarists. Hailed as a musical pioneer - her fascinating journey began after the Cultural Revolution, a period where Western musical instruments & music were banned. Xuefei was the first-ever guitarist in China to enter a music school, & became the first internationally recognised Chinese guitarist on the world stage. Her first public appearance was at the age of ten and received such acclaim that the Spanish Ambassador in China presented her with a concert guitar. Her debut in Madrid at the age of 14 was attended by the composer Joaquín Rodrigo and, when John Williams heard her play, he gave two of his own instruments to Beijing’s Central Conservatoire especially for her and other advanced students. 

Trio Arbós SPANISH PIANO TRIOS

Three years after Granados premiered his Trio in Madrid, his admired friend, Joaquín Malats, whom he had known since they were fellow students in Barcelona, premiered his Trio in B-flat at the Madrid Athenaeum. Music of exquisite, elegant, and fresh refinement, constant in flight and resounding in inspiration, condenses in its three movements all the creative potential of a musician who died prematurely at 40 years of age. Pedrell himself confesses in the first person his weakness for Chopin in his first period as a composer: In the year 1872, the chronic nocturnitis from which I suffered, and which was influenced by Chopin and Field, worsened, and I published, almost at the same time, two Nocturnos (in G minor and A major). After a month of intense work, the Trio in C Major op. 50 of Enrique Granados premiered on 22 February 1895, at the Salón Romero in Madrid, the favorite haunt of Madrids chamber evenings, as the culmination of a programme dedicated entirely to the music of Granados that included his Quintet and several pieces for piano. The present recording has been made using exclusively the manuscript of the Trio in C Major op. 50, held in the Museum of Music of Barcelona. The difference with the existing editions of the work and with the recordings based on those texts is more than notable.

Azumi Nishizawa DEBUSSY HOMMAGE

Fascinating journey through the music that unites Debussy with Spanish composers. Places are sounds: Granada. The city was a recurring source of inspiration for Debussy, and yet the composer never visited it; his knowledge of it was gained only indirectly through literary accounts, images, and musical sources heard in Paris. All of these materials served to unleash his imagination in regard to its sound, which according to Falla represented ‘the truth without authenticity, as not a single note is borrowed from Spanish folklore and yet, even in its smallest details, it wonderfully expresses Spain’. A common element links all the composers in the present program: the city of Paris. From the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the French capital was a fundamental goal for many Spanish composers, who at some point in their lives went there for study or work purposes.

Duo Cardellino DOUBLE JEU

The origin of duo Cardellino, two passionate twin sisters from an early age through music and the desire to play together. 

Curious to discover the abundant repertoire of the duo, they explore the original pieces and write many inedit transcriptions. 
Now soloists in two prestigious French orchestras, they are wanting to develop the Cardellino duo's activity on a regional, national and international level. 
The rich and complementary sounds of flute and cello have already charmed a wide audience at various concerts and festivals: 
Salle de l'esplanade à l'Arsenal de Metz, église de Vézelise, Festival Off Kultur à l'Autre Canal à Nancy, Salle Europa à Montigny-les-Metz, Chapelle Saint-Brieuc, Festival “Musiques’halles” de Dijon, Festival “Les Musicales” de Fontaine-lès-Dijon, Atelier Marcel Hastir à Bruxelles, Griselles, Château de Champlitte, Eglise de Saint-Apollinaire.
The Cardellino duo holds a chamber music diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music of Brussels

Waldo Geuns CUENTOS DE AMOR

What do we listen to when we play music? We listen to emotion, and passages which inspire. These passages sometimes stay with us in the form of indelible memories, if we hear them at the right time and in the right place. What are these ‘right’ moments? They are the moments during which the music’s emotion matches the events in our lives perfectly. A piece of music – indeed, a single chord may even be enough – can remind us of the joy or sadness we experienced in that moment. Through experiences like these, music speaks to us and becomes part of our lives.

For Waldo Geuns, one such unforgettable musical work is Goyescas by the Spanish composer Enrique Granados. He gives voice to love in all its joyful and challenging moments in this, his greatest piano suite. Granados uses the titles and the scenographic notes in the score to illustrate how two lovers make overtures to each other as they dance, how their relationship blossoms even as it weathers darker days, until fate ultimately takes its toll and one of the lovers passes away, leaving the other behind with nothing but beautiful memories.Granados, like Sergei Rachmaninov, was one of the last great pianist-composers. 

His mastery of the piano can be heard in his exceptional virtuosity and lyricism. It inspired Geuns to walk in his footsteps and write his own music, using his melodies as points of departure. Not only did this give Geuns greater insight into Granados’ music, but it also allowed him to add to his story one of the most beautiful moments in a romantic relationship: the moment of first eye contact, and the realisation that one’s life will never be the same from that moment on.

Xiayin Wang GRANADOS Goyescas - Allegro de Concierto - Ocho Valses Poéticos - Zapateado

After her quite exceptional accounts of both Rachmaninov sonatas, Xiayin Wang turns her attention to the rather different but hardly less virtuoso world of Granados. A good programme (albeit faced with stiff competition in Goyescas), well recorded (albeit in the slightly too resonant empty acoustic of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York) and convincingly played (albeit with some reservations).

Both books of Goyescas (1909 12), as their subtitle ‘o Los majos enamorados’ suggests, are essentially sensual and/or passionate love poems, something that Xiayin Wang conveys with sensitivity and obvious affection. But, for me, there is something lacking when compared with the benchmark recordings of Goyescas, Alicia de Larrocha’s 1976 account for Decca being primus inter pares. Wang’s are, unmistakably, studio recordings, with ‘Los requiebros’ and ‘Coloquio en la reja’ rarely lifting off the page. ‘El fandango de candil’ is enchantingly done but hear how Garrick Ohlsson with less pedal more clearly defines the fandango rhythm and its persistent triplet figure – both of them, incidentally, significantly slower than the composer on a convincing 1913 Welte & Soehne piano roll (Pierian 0002). The most famous number of the set (here entitled ‘The Maja and the Nightingale’ rather than ‘The Maiden …’), though adroitly paced, is prone to exaggerated expressiveness, unlike the account by Eileen Joyce (see page 60) who, at a similar tempo, manages most touchingly to find more of Granados’s melancolico precisely by not playing the melancolico card.

The early eight Valses poéticos are played with innate charm and empathy but Stephen Hough, with more tonal variety and subtler pedalling, is even more alluring (and – a small point – observes the repeat in the Presto-Vivace No 8, which Wang does not). The two unalloyed successes come before and after these: ‘Zapateado’ (the last of the Six Pieces on Spanish Folk Songs) and the Allegro de concierto, both exhilarating and exuberant, making one regret the fact that more pianists don’t programme Granados, and exuding an infectious spontaneity more consistently in evidence than elsewhere. (Jeremy Nicholas / Gramophone)

Anne Gastinel / Pablo Márquez IBÉRICA

This engaging new release leaves no doubt that the sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholy song of the cello can pull off a Spanish accent just as well as that of the classical guitar. With “Ibérica”, French cellist Anne Gastinel and Argentinean guitarist Pablo Márquez (whose recording of the vihuela music of Luys de Narváez so impressed recently – ECM, 10/07) bring an urbane and sophisticated yet earthy and sensual quality to the songs and dances of Falla and Granados, as well as the solo guitar and solo cello music of the great Spanish cellist and friend of Andrés Segovia, Gaspar Cassadó. The opening Danza española No 1 from Falla’s La vida breve is a revelation, Gastinel’s spiccato-studded bowing showering fiery notes over Márquez’s crisply articulated accompaniment; the Intermezzo from Granados’s opera Goyescas and the same composer’s tonadilla La maja dolorosa meanwhile highlights the intense beauty of Gastinel’scantabile playing.

In another tonadilla, the well known La maja de Goya, Márquez displays the finely nuanced singing quality of his own playing; he is equally convincing in three works for solo guitar by Cassadó (here recorded for the first time), especially in the moving Canción de Leonardo, a homage to Segovia’s young son who was killed in an accident in 1951.

Gastinel also makes a solo contribution with Cassadó’s famous Suite for solo cello, fully availing herself of the expressive possibilities of this superb, multifaceted work. But this disc ultimately belongs to the chemistry that seems to exist between these two remarkable musicians. (William Yeoman / Gramophone)

Simon Ghraichy HERITAGES

Simon Ghraichy is a 30 year old, Paris-based, Lebanese-Mexican pianist.  He juxtaposes his Latino-American and oriental roots with a European sensibility and history of classical music tradition that he has learned alongside masters such as Michel Béroff and Daria Hovora at the Conservatoire National de Paris (CNSMDP), and Tuija Hakkila at the Sibelius Academy of Helsinki. He’s attracted to traditional classical and romantic European repertoire, as well as lesser-known repertory by Latin American composers such as Villa-Lobos, Ponce, Gottschalk, Guarnieri, Chaves; Finnish composer Sibelius; and Australian and Anglo-Saxon contemporary composers.

Simon Ghraichy’s career took flight in 2010 when critic Robert Hughes of The Wall Street Journal praised his interpretation of the Réminiscences de Don Juan of Franz Liszt. He has performed in recitals, chamber music concerts and as a soloist with orchestras on five continents including the Brazil Symphony Orchestra, State of Mexico Symphony Orchestra, Cairo Symphony Orchestra, Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra, Cuba National Symphony Orchestra, UniSA international music festival in South Africa, the EXIT festival in Serbia, and the Isang Yun festival in South Korea.  Ghraichy has won numerous prizes and international distinctions at festivals including the BNDES (Banco do Brasil) International Piano Competition, the Manuel M. Ponce International Piano Competition in Mexico City, and the Torneo Internazionale di Musica in Rome. He is a laureate of the Gyorgy Cziffra Foundation with whom he collaborates yearly in Senlis (France) and different partner festivals.   In 2015, Simon Ghraichy debuts at the Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence at the Theatre du Jeu de Paume, and the Bard Music Festival and Carnegie Hall in New York.