Making Music at The Piano

Stravinsky’s collaboration with the violinist Samuel Dushkin was a great artistic success, generating new works for the repertoire as well as arrangements of some of the composer’s most tuneful and popular works. Of these arrangements, Dushkin wrote that Stravinsky seemed ‘to go back to the essence of the music and rewrite or recreate the music in the spirit of the new instrument’. Reviewing the current performers in The Independent, Bayan Northcott writes that ‘these are no ordinary transcriptions. In reducing items from The Firebird or The Fairy’s Kiss to the violin and piano medium, Stravinsky rethought and respaced their every chord’.

This CD brings together works from different periods of Edward MacDowell’s life, thus giving a good overview of the composer’s diverse and many-faceted piano oeuvre. MacDowell’s third piano sonata, Norse, op. 57 opens the recital. It is followed by compositions from his early and middle periods, written either in Germany or in Boston. Three pieces are included here from the cycle Sea Pieces, op. 55: To the Sea, Song and In Mid-Ocean, Composed either in New York or in MacDowell’s summer residence in Peterborough, these are late works, and bring the recital to a close.

This riveting music documentary traces the history of piano legend Oscar Peterson, from his early days as Montreal's teenage boogie-woogie sensation through his meteoric rise to international celebrity. One highlight in the treasure trove of musical gems is the legendary Oscar Peterson Trio (bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis) who, after a twenty-year hiatus, reunited in order to 'prove that it still had the magic.' Over 45 minutes of classic and contemporary performances complemented by rare film footage and in-depth interviews with a cast of jazz legends, creates a chronicle spanning four decades of Oscar Peterson's unforgettable music.

There's a tendency on the part of some performers to play Beethoven's First and Second Piano Concertos as if they were really by Mozart–all elegance, poise, and refinement. Happily, Boris Berezovsky finds the Beethovenian fire burning beneath the Mozartian surface. Right from his vibrant entrance in Concerto No. 1, Berezovsky plays with fierce energy (despite his generally light touch) and a clearly discernible enjoyment. This is matched Thomas Dausgaard's equally electric reading of the orchestral part, which in many ways reminds me of the classic Szell/Fleisher recording. Of course the small-scale sound of the 38-member Swedish Chamber Orchestra cannot possibly equal the full sonority of the Cleveland Orchestra in its heyday, but it's remarkable how Szell's clear textures and crisp articulation match Dausgaard's, who, by the way, is using the new Barenreiter editions. Berezovsky seems to be of like mind with Fleisher, at least terms of his singing tone and mercurial style.