Ballades

Ravel ~ Shéhérazade, Le Tombeau de Couperin | Debussy ~ Ballades de Villon
Deutsche Grammophon | 6 avril 2004 | Classical | APE+CUE | 3% Recovery | 268 MB | Covers+Booklet | 76'05"

Pierre Boulez and Anne Sofie von Otter collaborate on this beautiful disc with exceptional works by the most important composers of the Impressionist movement in classical music. The six-movement piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin was a tribute to the whole of 18th Century French music.
Ravel wrote it between 1914 and 1917, during which time he was serving as a lorry driver near the front, and each of the movements is dedicated to a friend killed in the fighting.
The exotic formed a notable element of Ravel's musical taste and consequently his well-known song cycle Shéhérazade with Debussyan textures and harmonies is gilded with an oriental glitter - a grateful task for a singer like Anne Sofie von Otter who can show all the colorful shades of her voice.

Following his recent dazzling Liszt recital (CDA67085), Stephen Hough turns his attention to the finest works of the young Brahms. Brahms's three piano sonatas are early works, culminating with the epic F minor Sonata. Spanning five movements, with dramatic and wildly virtuosic outer movements, and a hauntingly beautiful slow movement (described by Claudio Arrau as "the greatest love music after Tristan, and the most erotic"), this is one of the defining piano sonatas of the mid-nineteenth century.

France's Naïve label has heavily promoted the career of the young pianist Lise de la Salle, who was 22 when this recording was made. Her fashion-spread good looks fit with Naïve's design concepts, and she has the ability to deliver the spontaneous, unorthodox performances the label favors. How does she fare in a field extremely crowded with Chopin recitals? Her performances certainly aren't derivative of anyone else, and this live recording from the Semperoper in Dresden (you get a one-minute track of just applause at the end) has a good deal of attention-getting flair. The standout feature of de la Salle's performance, in the four ballades at least, is her orientation toward slow tempos, inventively deployed.

This recording represents a slice of a vanished world: pianist Nelly Akopian-Tamarina studied in Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s, and her teacher was Alexander Goldenweiser, a friend of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, and a carrier of traditions stretching well back into the 19th century. Her career was interrupted by disfavor with Soviet authorities in the 1970s, but has been resumed in her old age with compelling results.

Lars Vogt continues his series of concerto recordings with the Royal Northern Sinfonia with this new recording of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) First Piano Concerto together with Four Ballades (Op. 10) for solo piano. As in previous albums, Lars Vogt conducts from the keyboard. The evolution of Brahms 1st Piano Concerto took several steps. Originally conceived to become a Sonata for Two Pianos through orchestration it was developed into a four-movement Symphony until reaching into its final form of a Piano Concerto in three movements. During the process, which lasted from 1854 to 1856, some movements were also discarded and replaced by new material.

Chopin is touted to be the ‘poet’ of the piano. One must wonder what that means. A poem is an art form of taking written words and arranging them so that language is elevated up to an artistic realm. I feel Chopin, then, was indeed a poet of the piano. He took the extant musical language of his time, expanded the musical vocabulary, and arranged them to make the expanded scope of expression possible. Chopin’s music requires a specialised kind of pianism: supple yet strong fingers, an almost infinite range of tone colours, a sense of timing that is well-proportioned but not exaggerated, etc. Nina Svetlanova was my teacher during my doctoral studies at the Manhattan School of Music. She entered Heinrich Neuhaus’s studio in Moscow when she was sixteen. In that studio, she learned of secret know-hows of piano playing. Playing legato (or mimicking as best as you could) was part of countless brilliant ways of playing the piano.

Chopin wasn’t one for endowing his compositions with poetic titles. Unlike his contemporary Robert Schumann, the composer kept the titles of his work fairly simple, with no literary references such as those found in the poetic evocations of Carnaval or Kinderszenen to assist the imagination. But when, in the mid-1830s, Chopin presented a new piece naming it “Ballade,” Schumann noted that Chopin was the first to apply this literary term to a musical work. What was the nature of this new genre for solo piano? What kind of story was it telling?

Renowned Armenian-born pianist Marianna Shirinyan performs some of Chopin’s most fascinating and fiendish pieces: the four Ballades and four Scherzos. Chopin coined the term ‘ballade’, harking back to medieval minstrels singing poetic ballads. His four Ballades are quite different in character, but share a sense of Romantic story-telling in their dramatic contrasts and virtuoso display.

In 2019, when Alexandre Kantorow, at the age of 22, became the first French pianist to win the Gold Medal at the Tchaikovsky competition, his programme included no less than three works by Johannes Brahms. Two of these, Piano Sonata No. 2 and the Rhapsody in B minor, he went on to record for release on his previous, highly praised recital disc, which was awarded distinctions such as Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice, Diapason d’Or, and Choc de Classica. The Brahms interpretations won Kantorow particular praise – the Guardian (UK) described them as ‘magisterial’ while the website ResMusica placed his sonata ‘among the great reference recordings of the piece – if not the modern one.’ There is much to look forward to, then, when Kantorow releases an all-Brahms album with a playing time of no less than 85 minutes.