月刊ホテル旅館 – 5月 2020

Boris Giltburg has set out to study and film all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas by the end of 2020. The project started as a personal exploration, driven by curiosity and his strong love of the Beethoven sonatas. These performances display Giltburg’s customary spirit and technical finesse, and also convey the electric atmosphere of the live recording.

Louis Lortie completes his survey of the piano concertos of Saint-Saëns with Nos 3 and 5 (the Egyptian), adding the Rhapsodie dAuvergne and Allegro appassionato for good measure. As before, he is joined by Edward Gardner and the BBC Philharmonic.

For this set of Beethoven's first five symphonies, Jordi Savall began with the fundamental idea of recovering the original sound of the orchestra and tempo as the composer imagined them. All the orchestral work was performed with instruments corresponding to those used at the time, and by 55-60 musicians, a number similar to that arranged by the composer. 35 players were selected from Le Concert des Nations alongside 20 young musicians from different countries across world. The main goal was to reflect, in our 21st century, all the richness and beauty of these symphonies, through a true balance between colors and the quality of the orchestra's natural sound.

With 17 symphonies and 32 concertos to date, Kalevi Aho is one of today’s most prolific composers of large-scale orchestral scores. The present disc brings together two works separated by 35 years, but also by the reception they have enjoyed: whereas Sieidi, the percussion concerto Aho composed in 2010, has become one of his most performed works, Symphony No. 5 from the mid-70s is a rarely heard score. Sieidi was written for Colin Currie, who has recorded it here and who performs the concerto with orchestras across the world.

From the opening funeral dirge of the Quartet No.1 to the incandescent frenzy that concludes the fifth, this disc offers a genuine panorama of the Bartókian universe. It's a world unto itself, constantly stamped with the heritage of Hungarian folklore so dear to the composer. Two years after a first volume devoted to the even-numbered works (Nos. 2, 4 and 6), the musicians of the Jerusalem Quartet expertly complete their recording of a key cycle of modern chamber music, a musical saga drawn on the scale of a lifetime.