Pantomime #1

Glazunov’s beautifully scored incidental music for Lermontov’s play Masquerade has only survived in manuscript. With characteristic genius, he illustrates both the glittering atmosphere and dances of splendid St Petersburg balls and depicts the horrifying descent into madness of the play’s protagonist, Evgeny Arbenin, who jealously poisons his innocent wife. The shorter works on this disc likewise show Glazunov’s amazing command of orchestral resources, whether evoking an exotic oriental vision, the vivacious spirit of Hungarian music, in the Pas de caractère, or painting a mood of gentle romantic lyricism.

Jules Massenet - Stefan Irmer - Complete Solo Piano Works
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 249 MB | Full Artwork: 87 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: MDG "Scene"# 618 1729-2 | Country/Year: Germany 2012
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

"…Stefan Irmer has clearly studied and truly learned this music. So often on a disc of rarely performed music one gets the feeling that the pianist is sight-reading the notes in order to make a recording of previously unrecorded music. Not so here. Irmer performs with wonderful clarity, variety of tone, panache, and commitment. He truly sells the music.
Natural recorded sound, capturing very well the 1901 Steinway used for the recording, rounds out a delightful disc." ~Fanfare

Jules Massenet - Stefan Irmer - Complete Solo Piano Works
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 249 MB | Full Artwork: 87 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: MDG "Scene"# 618 1729-2 | Country/Year: Germany 2012
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

"…Stefan Irmer has clearly studied and truly learned this music. So often on a disc of rarely performed music one gets the feeling that the pianist is sight-reading the notes in order to make a recording of previously unrecorded music. Not so here. Irmer performs with wonderful clarity, variety of tone, panache, and commitment. He truly sells the music.
Natural recorded sound, capturing very well the 1901 Steinway used for the recording, rounds out a delightful disc." ~Fanfare

Decameron produced four albums between 1973 and 1976 (Some discographies listed a recording called "Beyond the Light" but this never saw release). This long CD contains all of the third disk and a most of the worthiest pieces on the fourth. Considering their short recording career, Decameron exhibited a fairly wide range of musical styles and talent as they flitted from label to label. But it was all loosely in the British folk rock realm with more than a casual nod to the lighter elements of progressive rock in vogue at the time. The enigmatic style of that genre is displayed in the stunning "All the Best Wishes", the reverent "The Ungodly", the intensely melodic "Journey's End" bathed in mellotron, and "The Deal". The lighter pieces are equally engaging, such as "Saturday" about rolling down the windows and blasting the stereo and shouting obscenities at the market crowd, "Road to the Sea" with its rollicking rhythms and musical and lyrical allusions to the nautical, "Fallen Over", and "Tomorrow's pantomime".

This disc features one of Perle's earliest surviving compositions Pantomime, Interlude and Fugue (1937). Also included are his 1971 Fantasy-Variations, which combine an improvisational (but precisely notated) musical rhetoric with a more tightly structured variation format; Six New Etudes (1984), a companion set to Perle's immensely successful Six Etudes of 1976 (recorded by Bradford Gowen on NW 304); Suite in C (1970), and the fiendishly difficult Short Sonata (1964). In 1986, Perle received the Pulitzer Prize in music and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship—honors confirming his belated emergence as one of today's most distinguished composers