Carlo Grante

This is the second volume of Music & Arts' complete Scarlatti project performed by Carlo Grante. New Classics [UK] wrote of that release: Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form…. Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys.

This is the second volume of Music & Arts' complete Scarlatti project performed by Carlo Grante. New Classics [UK] wrote of that release: Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form…. Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys.

Ferruccio Busoni’s Elegies (1908) and An die Jugend (1909) are experimental pieces that explore new pathways in the composer’s harmonic language and artistic evolution. Elegies is an aesthetic manifesto, a wish for a turning point in the composer’s creative evolution, but also, more ambitiously, in all future music. Ferruccio Busoni believed that music should be, as he commented to the critic and composer Hans Pfitzner, “well meant and full of peace,” but this did not preclude the provocative gesture of the Elegies’ exceptional harmonic variety, brought about by new chordal progressions and juxtapositions and giving an impression of a potentially inexhaustible tonality. An die Jugend is a collection of four pieces written in 1909 and published as four separate ‘books’ in the same year. These pieces have some stylistic features with Busoni’s first Elegy, while showing even further experimentation on the composer’s part. Carlo Grante performs these works on a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano.

I spend part of every summer at the Aspen Music Festival, at least partly because it's where one can easily hear a lot of young musicians, some of them still students, who are the cream of the crop. It's there that I heard, when they were very young, musicians like Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, Sarah Chang, Yefim Bronfman, Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Kalichstein, Ian Hobson and many others. I've been amazed, repeatedly, at the quality of youngsters coming up. An embarrassment of riches, one would have to say. And it's hard to keep track of them.

Antonin Dvorak - Klavierquartette op. 23 & 87 / Klavierquintett op. 81 / Bagatellen op. 47
Juilliard String Quartet - Rudolf Firkusny
EAC+LOG+CUE | 2xFLAC: 541 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Sony Classical # 5200192000 | Country/Year: Europe 2005
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

…Firkušný taught at the Juilliard School in New York, and in Aspen, Colorado as well as in the Berkshire Music Centre in Tanglewood. Among his students were Yefim Bronfman, Eduardus Halim, Alan Weiss, Sara Davis Buechner, Carlisle Floyd, Kathryn Selby, Avner Arad, June de Toth, Richard Cionco, Robin McCabe, Anya Laurence, Natasa Veljkovic and Carlo Grante. After the fall of the communist regime in his homeland (the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989), Firkušný returned to Czechoslovakia to perform for the first time after more than 40 years of absence…