Maria McKee returns early next year with a new album La Vita Nuova. Mckee is remembered for her role in American country-rock band Lone Justice and for issuing some amazing solo records, including 1993’s You Gotta Sin To Be Saved (which includes the exquisite ‘I’m Gonna Soothe You’) and Life Is Sweet ( from 1996). Of course, she best known for UK number one single ‘Show Me Heaven’ which was featured in the Tony Scott film Days of Thunder.
Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole … Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.
"For this Album I choosed three different violins with bows to match have helped to maintain the performance authentic throughout the program."
A brilliant dancer before becoming “famous throughout Europe for his learned and elaborate sonatas, and for the elegance of his performance on the violin”, Jean-Marie Leclair is far more than the sum of his talents. His music is woven with the multiple threads of his life, carrying within it all the facets of his technical and musical explorations, his travels, his impressions, which have moulded man as much as musician.