Bella Davidovich

Bella Davidovich (born in 1928) won the prestigious Warsaw International Chopin Competition in 1949, sharing first prize with pianist Halina Czerny-Stefanska. This is a rare recording of Chopin's two Piano concertos, with a warm sense of music. The piano has a weak presence, as if Chopin himself were playing. The London Symphony Orchestra, under Sir Neville Marriner, is not only an accompanist, but it has a full powerful presence. Enjoy this jewel!

Russia is vast, and so is this 25-disc tribute to the great piano school of Russia-from the long-famous icons to the more recent inheritors of this ineffably proud tradition. Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lazar Berman and many others display their subtly various approaches to phrasing and timbre as they perform the great works of the Russian canon and composers across Europe. Monumental works like the first piano concertos of both Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev sit alongside intimate salon pieces like Tchaikovsky's The Seasons and rarely heard works such as the preludes of Kabalevsky. Many of these rapturously beautiful performances are rare and have never been available on CD!

Russia is vast, and so is this 25-disc tribute to the great piano school of Russia-from the long-famous icons to the more recent inheritors of this ineffably proud tradition. Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lazar Berman and many others display their subtly various approaches to phrasing and timbre as they perform the great works of the Russian canon and composers across Europe. Monumental works like the first piano concertos of both Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev sit alongside intimate salon pieces like Tchaikovsky's The Seasons and rarely heard works such as the preludes of Kabalevsky. Many of these rapturously beautiful performances are rare and have never been available on CD!

"You can freely paraphrase Louis XIV and say: I am the orchestra! I am the cho¬rus! I am also the conductor!” With these words Hector Berlioz paid homage to a man who was indeed all of these things put together: Franz Liszt.
This eulogy, however, was not only for Liszt, the man; it was also for his instrument and the compositions he wrote for it, an instrument which, also in part thanks to Liszt, became the dominant instrument of bourgeois musical culture in the 19th century: the piano. The reason for this dominance? Liszt himself gave the answer by ascribing to the piano and to the ten fingers of the pianist the ability to reproduce the sonorities and harmonies of an entire orchestra. The improvements made to the piano at that time (around 1825), e.g. the new Erard repetition action and the exponsion of the instrument's range to seven octaves, support these claims.

The Polish pianist Halina Czerny-Stefanska (1922 - 1982) enjoyed a more substantial reputation among piano buffs than among music-lovers in general until she was unexpectedly shot to prominence by a mistake that got her talked about all around the world. In the early 1950s she had performed the First Concerto of Chopin under Vaclav Smetacek in a recording issued by the Czech label Supraphon; when EMI reissued the performance in 1965 it was attributed to Dinu Lipatti, the Romanian pianist whose premature death in 1950 robbed classical music of one of its brightest stars.