Estrella Morente / Javier Perianes MANUEL DE FALLA - FEDERICO GARCíA LORCA Encuentro

                                                                      ENCUENTRO

Tabea Zimmermann / Javier Perianes CANTILENA

                                                                    CANTILENA

Javier Perianes / Orchestre de Paris / Josep Pons RAVEL Concerto en Sol - Le Tombeau de Couperin

As if in a mirror, this recording juxtaposes the original piano versions of two of Ravel's masterpieces (Le Tombeau de Couperin and Alborada del gracioso) with their respective orchestrations. The Concerto in G major combines the two facets, both when the piano is integrated into the overall sound and when it plays its role as a soloist. The subtle playing of Javier Perianes and the refined sonorities of the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Josep Pons, also remind us that Spain was the most significant source of inspiration in Ravel's output.

Javier Perianes / Münchner Philharmoniker / Pablo Heras-Casado BARTÓK Concerto for Orchestra - Piano Concerto No. 3

Neither the disillusionment that set in after his exile to the United States nor his declining health stopped Bartók from fulfilling his commission for the Concerto for Orchestra nor from writing the Third Piano Concerto, his final work, intended to secure his wife’s future. Hence his gloomy circumstances led to two masterpieces (and gained him a long-awaited American reputation). They are magnificently served here by Javier Perianes and the musicians of the Münchner Philharmoniker under the direction of Pablo Heras-Casado.
...The Concerto for Orchestra was composed in a single burst of inspiration during an unexpected remission of his leukaemia, from August to October 1943. It is Bartók's only orchestral work on so large a scale. Fascinating both for its sonic hedonism and for the virtuosity it demands from each section of the orchestra (which justifies the choice of this title rather than ‘symphony’), the work sums up the composer’s achievement...

...The Piano Concerto no.3, the only keyboard work that Bartók did not compose for himself to play, has a less gruelling solo part than its two predecessors. Here he forsakes ostinatos, repeated notes and batteries of chords in favour of singing melodies. Tonality is clearly asserted (the key is E), and triads, octaves and unisons abound, as if sending out reassuring signals...

Javier Perianes FREDERIC MOMPOU Música Callada

Catalan composer Federico Mompou wrote four volumes of brief, aphoristic piano pieces called Música callada, or Music of silence, between 1959 and 1967. He seemed to inhabit a musical world of his own, indifferent or hostile to many of the conventions of western music, particularly Germanic music, which he described as "phonorrhea," with an excess of padding, ponderous development, and numbing redundancies. His aesthetic is similar in some ways to Satie's, and their works have some similarities, particularly the use of a simple, but unconventional tonal language that is not shy of dissonance. Mompou's music is notable for the simplicity and clarity of its content and its expression -- there are no wasted or unnecessary notes. It is almost all very quiet music and has a rhythmic fluidity that often obscures a sense of pulse. As a child, the composer grew up near his grandfather's bell factory, and he traced his musical aesthetic to the experience of hearing the bells. Many of the sonorities in Música callada can indeed best be described as bell-like. Spanish pianist Javier Perianes plays with an unmannered delicacy and a self-effacing directness that honor the ephemeral character of these pieces and allows their poetry to blossom. The sound is absolutely clear and captures the intimacy of the music. (Stephen Eddins)

Javier Perianes BLASCO DE NEBRA Piano Sonatas

Manuel Blasco de Nebra (1750-1784) was a keyboard player as well as a composer, and an assistant to his father José, who was organist at Seville Cathedral. Manuel is reckoned to have composed around 170 works in his short career, but of those only 30 pieces, all for either harpsichord or fortepiano, survive. Javier Peranes plays eight of them on this beautiful disc, six sonatas and two of the rustic, three-movement pastorelas. Perianes uses a modern concert grand, and shows that while Blasco de Nebra was influenced by the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, most of all – his sonatas all adopt the same two-movement, slow- fast scheme – he was well aware of what was happening musically elsewhere in Europe in the 1770s. Blasco de Nebra's expressive world is far more searching than anything in Scarlatti's 500-odd sonatas: the opening Adagio of his Sonata No 1 in C minor, for instance, sounds almost like a Chopin nocturne, and elsewhere his harmonic world can be a richly mysterious one. Perianes sometimes lards the music with a bit too much of that expressiveness, but otherwise his performances are excellent, communicating a real sense of revelation, of bringing a distinctive composer's voice to a 21st-century audience for the first time. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

Javier Perianes / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo EDVARD GRIEG Piano Concerto - Lyric Pieces

Javier Perianes’s account of Grieg’s Piano Concerto was recorded live at London’s Barbican last October, at the end of a BBCSO tour. And it is an interpretation into which soloist and orchestra seem, gratifyingly, to have grown together. In the first movement, Sakari Oramo leads the orchestra off at a tempo that seems rather steady, but which leaves space for some careful phrasing: once the main theme gets to Perianes, it sounds almost like a statement and then a comment, rather than a single entity. Somehow, Oramo and Perianes make this sound interesting rather than fussy, and the romantic expansiveness that marks their interpretation overall is tempered by playing from both pianist and orchestra that is as crisp and highly charged as one could want. Paired with this is a selection of 12 of the solo Lyric Pieces, recorded in the studio, all individually characterised but reaffirming Perianes’s warm, spacious approach to Grieg’s music. (Erica Jeal / The Guardian)

Javier Perianes ...les sons et les parfums DEBUSSY meets CHOPIN

The piano pieces of Frédéric Chopin and Claude Debussy may be regarded as coming from either side of the great Romantic divide, conceived in reaction against the movement's excesses yet often embodying its ideals. Chopin never considered himself a Romantic, and Debussy struggled to eradicate its influence. Both composers had a common interest in avoiding the grandiose forms and sweeping gestures of Liszt and Wagner, and instead sought beauty in intimate forms, such as miniatures and character pieces. Yet, insofar as they were both poets of the piano, they expressed the Romantic passion for evoking moods and love of tone painting, and in terms of expression, Chopin and Debussy have much in common. Javier Perianes perceives the way Debussy absorbed Chopin's refined musical language and shaped it into his own, without overtly borrowing or quoting, and this accounts for many of their shared sonorities, effects, and mannerisms. For this Harmonia Mundi album, Perianes alternates tracks between Chopin and Debussy, so listeners can draw their own conclusions about the many similarities as well as the obvious differences, and appreciate Perianes' subtle treatment of such diaphanous and iridescent music. (Blair Sanderson)