RARITIES OF PIANO MUSIC
AT SCHLOSS VOR HUSUM 2017
Danacord 799 / *****
The annual festival of piano rarities
at the northern German seaside town of Husum
grows from strength to strength in its 31st year. An aural snapshot
of last year’s festival is vividly captured in this 79-minute-long album. The
works of 24 composers and transcribers are heard and it is tantalising to
imagine what has not been included here.
There are complete performances
of two works: Carl Czerny’s Variations On A Theme By Carl Rode “La
Ricordanza”, with its florid elaborations fluently rendered by Italian
pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi, and Russian Dmitri Blagoy’s three-movement Fairy
Tale Sonata, lovingly related by Vincenzo Maltempo, another Italian. Both play
up to 12 minutes each, and are the longest tracks.
From celebrated French-Canadian
virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin comes his completion of an unpublished
Chopin-Godowsky Etude (Nouvelle Etude No.1), never previously
recorded, and his own Toccata On L’Homme Armé, his thorny set-piece
written for the 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
There are
short tracks, excerpts from works by Gabriel Dupont, Leonid Desyatnikov, Fikret
Amirov, Abram Chasins and Paul Hindemith, not exactly household names. This
year’s highlights also have a popular slant with transcriptions of songs by
Poulenc (Les Chemins D’Amour), Grainger (Londonderry Air),
Donizetti (Casta Diva from Norma) and John Green (Body And
Soul).
The other pianists include Daniel Berman, Nadezhda Vlaeva, Lukas
Geniusas, Emile Naoumoff, Satu Paavola and Misha Dacic, all of whom are
compelling artists. The enjoyment quotient is very high, and the recorded sound
close to excellent.
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