Mark Viner

Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) was a highly successful female pianist and composer. As a pianist she toured the European countries, in 1892 making her debut in England, making acquaintance with one of her biggest fans, Queen Victoria. In 1908 she made her American debut, gaining instant and immense popularity. • The reason for Chaminade’s popularity is the charm, tunefulness and general accessibility of her music. It touches a ready chord with every music lover, and the fancy titles and not overly virtuosic piano writing made that her works became drawing room favorites of the epoch.

Mark Viner The young British pianist talks to Katherine about the music of the eccentric Parisian pianist-composer, which he's championed throughout his career.

Mark Viner is recognized as one of the most exciting British concert pianists of his generation and is becoming increasingly well known for his bold championing of unfamiliar pianistic terrain. He studied at the Purcell School of Music and the Royal College where his principal teachers included Tessa Nicholson and Niel Immelman. Having won first prize at the C.V. Alkan – P. J. G. Zimmerman International Piano Competition in Athens in 2012, his international engagements have flourished, he has been broadcast on German Radio and been invited to the Oxford Lieder Festival, Cheltenham Music Festival, ProPiano Hamburg and Husum Rarities of Piano Music in Germany. Last year he was invited to play for the Prince of Wales’s visit to his hometown of Oxford. Due to his close association with unjustly neglected areas of the piano literature, he was recently elected Chairman of the Alkan Society.

British pianist Mark Viner continues his Alkan project with a new recording of the towering Grande Sonate Op. 33 “Les quatre âges” (in which Alkan musically describes the several stages of Man’s Life in 4 movements, from exuberant youth to tragic old age), and the “3 Morceaux dans le genre pathétique”, three highly original tone poems, one evoking the howling winter wind, one a love poem and the third “Morte’ evoking a haunted cemetery, uncannily pre-echoing Ravel’s Le Gibet.

Above the album worked the 'Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy, Mark Viner, Philipp Kopachevsky - Three Revolutionary Romantic Piano Sonatas ', and his release took place on 2021. The album has got songs with a total duration of more than an hour. A compilation is a compilation of original music.

The latest volume in a revelatory Alkan series from an English pianist with a string of critically acclaimed albums of rare repertoire from the Golden Age of the piano virtuoso to his credit.Perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the history of music as a whole, let alone the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan remains one of the most intriguing and alluring names among the pantheon of pianist-composers.

First published in 1847, these preludes form a highly original set of pieces, effectively Alkan’s first foray into the genre of cyclic shorter pieces. The set stands aside from so many in its consistently reflective and introspective approach to a genre recently redefined by Chopin. The key sequence guides us through all the major and minor keys, but instead of settling for all 24 major and minor tonalities, Alkan comes full circle for a twenty-fifth and final C major prelude to complete the set.

Reclusive and eccentric, the French pianist– composer Charles-Valentin Alkan was also undoubtedly one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, and a composer who, like his friend and fellow virtuoso Liszt, pushed the boundaries of what his instrument, and human pianism, could achieve. Again like Liszt, he composed music that was not merely flashy and difficult to play it tapped a deep comprehension of music history and theory, a flair for the lyrical and the dramatic and of course a vast imagination.