Bosendorfer

Alexander Melnikov’s recent, excellent set of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues (currently nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Awards) demonstrated eloquently that he was no slavish follower of performing tradition. This new disc of Brahms’s earliest surviving piano works shows his questing musicality in another way. In an absorbing booklet essay on Brahms’s pianos and pianism, Melnikov cites the copious (and contradictory) evidence of how Brahms played, and what pianos he used and favoured. Brahms’s partiality for Steinways and Streichers is well attested, as is his admiration for Bösendorfer’s instruments, and Melnikov has opted here for an 1875 Bösendorfer even though, as he comments, it is ‘notoriously difficult to play and to regulate’, shortcomings ‘compensated by the beauty and nobility of its sound’. Those qualities, along with immediacy of attack, agile articulation and individuation of registers, are admirably well caught in this recording: no matter that none of these works were played on such an instrument when they were new. Melnikov shows himself a formidable Brahmsian, and the piano’s ‘nobility’ is best displayed in the surging grandeur he brings to the finale of the C major and the intensely sensitive readings of both sonatas’ variation-form slow movements.

The Köln Concert is a concert recording by the pianist Keith Jarrett of solo piano improvisations performed at the Opera House in Cologne (German: Köln) on January 24, 1975. The double-vinyl album was released in 1975 by the ECM Records label to critical acclaim, and went on to become the best-selling solo album in jazz history, and the all-time best-selling piano album, with sales of more than 3.5 million.

There are undoubtedly many piano trios in jazz. However, only very few of them have consistently done "their thing" as has the Marc Perrenoud Trio for many years to get inexorably to the top of their field. They have developed a language, which takes its inspiration from many sources like Esperanto and consequently can be learned and experienced by many. Opulently furnished harmony sequences remind you of Bach's work, but then you are reminded of rock fanfares in the next moment. Only a few minutes later, and we are in the delta of blues that takes us on swinging waters. Then back to ballads full of sensitivity, which almost call études to mind.