6 Spiegel

Samira Spiegel is an exceptional talent: she has won prizes at international competitions on both the violin and the piano! With GENUIN, she now presents an exciting album featuring music for both instruments inspired by Bach. On the piano, the works range from Franz Liszt's "Fantasie und Fuge" to Busoni's adaptation of the "Chaconne" and Francis Poulenc's "Waltz Improvisation" to Damian Scholl's "une fleuve tranquille" from 2013. On the violin, she juxtaposes Eugène Ysaye's fifth solo sonata, which is genuinely haunted by Bach, with the original "Chaconne" by the great Leipzig master. An adventurous and ludicrously virtuosic ride through styles and centuries!

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is almost exclusively associated with his later works. Born in 1935, his early music was very much ‘avant-garde’ in style. In the 1970s, he increasingly found his inspiration in medieval religious music, both western and eastern European. This first transpired in his Für Alina for piano. It features the telling low tempo and two layer structure which were to become trademarks of his later works.

Almost unknown for years because of the general focus on Louis Vierne as an organ composer, the Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 42, of this student of Franck and Widor has been unearthed and has received at least a couple of recordings. The work is superb. For those wondering, it does resemble Vierne's organ music. It is highly chromatic, densely contrapuntal, and often built around lines that are introduced with each instrument playing a note of a large chord in sequence for a very organ-like effect. Beyond this is a highly personal quality that marries an intimacy akin to that of Janácek's chamber music to the monumental style Vierne inherited.

The browser noticing this disc might be forgiven for thinking that the current trend toward recording obscure works of the classical period had gone too far. Not only does it present a work by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, otherwise known almost exclusively as the man who completed Mozart's Requiem under sleazy circumstances after the composer's death – it also offers that work in an arrangement for winds by an even more obscure composer, Johann Nepomuk Wendt. But give it a spin (or a click): it's not without interest for those with a deep interest in Mozart, especially in the opera The Magic Flute. Süssmayr's opera Der Spiegel von Arkadien (The Mirror of Arcadia) was his biggest success during his own lifetime.

From the fiery boogie opener ‘Any Second Now’, through to the dark acoustic closing of ‘Old Wounds’, Cut and Run takes the listener on a trip from honest acoustic ballads to searing Blues Rock and captures Lloyd Spiegel at his best as a vocalist and guitarist while providing some of his best lyrical work to date. This album, along with This Time Tomorrow (2017) and last year’s Backroads concludes a trilogy of albums and represents the fruits of an intensely creative time for the Melbourne-based bluesman. Says Spiegel, “the last three years I’ve written one album while touring the previous so it’s a natural progression that each group of songs is a response to the last. Cut and Run has a positivity and clarity in it that for me, resolves a great deal of the questions I asked myself on the last two albums. It’s definitely the end of a chapter for me both musically and personally.”