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)

Claire Booth / Christopher Glynn PERCY GRAINGER Folk Music

Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn explore the fascinating and multifaceted folk song output of the original and inventive composer Percy Grainger. Percy Grainger was an extraordinary human being and musician - a precocious pianist, colourful composer and world traveller, a peculiarly passionate and emotive eccentric whose fertile mind produced an expansive oeuvre of original and inventive works. Above all Grainger is best known for his most enduring musical endeavour, his exploration and dissemination of folk music. With this release, soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn, who have spent decades delving into Grainger's folk music output, document their fascination with the multifaceted firebrand, and bring his alluring music to a wider audience. Grainger's success resulted in multiple versions of his folk song settings, for orchestra, wind band, chamber ensemble and choir. But it's perhaps his versions for voice and piano that are the most characteristic, bringing out Grainger's own highly individual style at the keyboard. Claire's and Christopher's survey, one of the most comprehensive available on the market today, offers a variety of transcriptions of songs found in collections from the British Isles as well as discoveries Grainger heard as he roamed throughout the field. The album concludes with Grainger's most celebrated piece, English Country Gardens, in which Claire makes a cameo appearance on piano, joining Christopher in a rousing duet. "The exemplary soprano soloist, handling the slippery vocal lines as if there was nothing remotely challenging about them" - The Guardian "At Carnegie Hall pianist Christopher Glynn was an exemplary partner, by turns impossibly delicate, colourfully nimble and thunderously firm." (Opera News)