Klose Etude

Quatuor Diotima celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of Anton Bruckner with a recording of his String Quartet in C Minor, Rondo in C Minor and Theme with Variations in E-Flat Major, alongside the String Quartet in E-Flat Major from his pupil Friedrich Klose. Bruckner wrote these pieces as composition exercises, yet they adumbrate the originality and power of his later works, as well as pay tribute to the glorious Viennese quartet tradition. Like Bruckner, Klose strongly sympathized with Wagner and the proponents of programme music, and chamber music had not appealed to him very much up until the moment he embarked on his only string quartet composition.

Celebrated for his vivid orchestral pieces and effective scores for such films as Altered States and The Red Violin, John Corigliano is somewhat less renowned for his chamber music and keyboard oeuvre. Yet his international career took off with the premiere of his Sonata for violin and piano (1963), and he has periodically composed important works for piano, all of which show the same expertise and originality displayed in his major concert works. These sophisticated but highly entertaining pieces are not insufficiently recorded, but they are usually scattered about on CDs with other composers' works, so it is good to find them together on this 2006 Black Box release, in lively performances and recorded with fine sound. Violinist Corey Cerovsek and pianist Andrew Russo deliver what is probably the most engaging and accessible performance of the program in the sonata, a neo-Classical work that evokes the Americana style of Copland as well as the academic counterpoint of Hindemith.

The best-known piano studies are the 27 by Chopin, most of them composed in the 1830s. But Chopin did not create the genre: a number of prominent pianist-composers had already established the piano study, or étude, in the decades before Chopin sat down to write his. Although this repertoire is as good as unknown today, it is a treasure-trove of miniature jewels, many of them announcing the dawn of Romanticism in their combination of Classical delicacy and a new harmonic warmth.

This LP finds pianist Oscar Peterson at a transitional point in his career. Louis Hayes was the new drummer in his trio and, although veteran Ray Brown was on bass during the earlier of the two sessions, he would depart by 1966 (after 15 years) and be replaced by Sam Jones. However, the basic sound of the Oscar Peterson Trio remained unchanged (Peterson was the dominant voice anyway) and the personality of the group remained intact. Peterson contributed three originals (including the hard-swinging title cut) to this program and also sounds typically fine on "Let's Fall in Love," "The Shadow of Your Smile," "If I Were a Bell," and a definitive version of "Stella by Starlight."