Jürgen Geiger A DREAM

 

 A DREAM

BACH PIANO LEGENDS

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Moye Chen FOUR WORLDS

This album has a lot of spirit, and doesn’t lack for technical accomplishment. Chinese pianist Moye Chen has taken as his theme three composer/pianists (or in the case of Vladimir Horowitz it’s really pianist/composer) who made their home in the USA – Grainger, Horowitz and Rachmaninov.

In some ways this feels like a project in which – to use a gastronomic analogy – the dessert comes before the main course, because I can imagine almost any of the first 13 of the 16 tracks working as recital encores. Chen is wonderfully inside Grainger’s crunchy textures and hearty sentimentality, and his reading of Colonial Song is particularly gorgeous. He’s also in command of Grainger’s wild ragtime fantasy In Dahomey, where not only does the “feel” come to him naturally, but the considerable pianistic challenges hold no terrors for him either. Here, and in Horowitz’s outlandish fantasy on The Stars and Stripes Forever, Chen’s impish sense of humour is well to the fore.

He has a fine ear for the young Rachmaninov’s dynamism and elegance, and his singing line in the Op. 3 Mélodie is beautiful to behold. But his leisurely way with the Russian composer’s transcription of the Minuet from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne music is a harbinger of problems to come in his reading of the album’s grand finale, Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No 2. It sounds to me as if Chen has fallen in love with the music, not wisely, but too well, and is oftentimes reluctant to move on. In a big work like this the pianist is also ideally a strategist and a story-teller, someone who helps you perceive the landscape from a distance while also pointing out the beauty of the next hill. The piece holds no fears for Chen technically, but the competition on disc is fierce, and Ashkenazy, Jablonski and Kocsis (all on Decca), to name just three, have a better sense than Chen of how to pace this music. (Phillip Sametz)

HOROWITZ Return to Chicago

On November 13^th Deutsche Grammophon will release, for the very first time, a recording that Horowitz made for Chicago radio station WFMT in 1986. Vladimir Horowitz was unquestionably one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. He elevated the art of piano playing to new levels as Liszt had done some 100 years before him. 

Horowitz was popular in Chicago – between 1928 and 1986 he played there thirty seven times, having to repeat most of his performances in order to reach as many of his admirers as possible. By 1986 he’d come up with perhaps a better plan: a concert that would be broadcast as a gift to the city of Chicago. It was broadcast locally over Chicago’s premiere classical radio station WFMT. It was broadcast only once more and has not been heard since that time, lying all but forgotten in WFMT’s vaults until producer Jon M. Samuels discovered its existence in October 2013.

The recording presents late-period Horowitz, starting with two Scarlatti sonatas before revisiting favourites Mozart and Scriabin. The second half brings new repertoire to the Deutsche Grammophon discography, namely, the Schumann Arabesque in C major, op. 18 and a Chopin Mazurka in C sharp minor, op. 63 no. 3.

Also included are two interviews with Horowitz that were used as intermission features during the broadcast. The first, with host Norman Pellegrini, was recorded the day before the concert. The second, conducted by Thomas Willis (Senior Music Critic of the Chicago Tribune), was recorded on October 30, 1974 on the occasion of Horowitz’s return to Chicago after a six-year absence. (Deutsche Grammophon)