Christian Wolff was once the baby of the New York School, only 19 when he cast his lot with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown; in 2008, he is the last man standing. Solo piano music is central to Wolff's output, and on Neos' Christian Wolff: Piano Pieces, German pianist Sabine Liebner performs a nice cross section of his efforts in this medium from 1969 to 2006. It takes a pianist with some amount of insight to realize Wolff's compositions, all to some degree open ended, and he does not spell out all of the details.
Blend imaginative yet learned interpretation, profound sensitivity and poetry, and personal charisma, and you have here one of the finest accounts of Brahms’s late piano works on record, one that stands head and shoulders above most contenders in an ever-growing catalogue…Hough reveals each miniature as a compact piece of theatre, putting an array of timbres and varied accentuation at its service.
A cult record if there ever was one, Patrick Cohen’s Satie goes far beyond any one of the many versions of this music on the market. It is simply something else. Possibly the best CD Glossa has ever produced, it has provoked controversies of all sorts since its release in 1998, not only due to the interpretation and the instrument used, an 1855 Érard piano, but also because of the polemical essay which accompanies the recording.
The Russian pianist Sergey Tanin, born in 1995 in Yakutia / Siberia, emerged as the winner of the audience award and the third jury award at the last Concours Géza Anda 2018 and received numerous other awards in Russia, Finland and Germany. “His well-groomed, pure and honest piano playing is reminiscent of the values of the great Russian piano school. The music develops naturally and unobtrusively under his fingers. In the poetic and intimate passages, the artist succeeds in developing a great affinity for the composers of the works performed, ”was the artistic judgment of the Zurich jury.
Ernst Toch est né en 1887 à Vienne, Empire Austro-hongrois (Autriche). D'abord autodidacte, il étudia ensuite la composition et le piano au Conservatoire Hoch de Francfort (Allemagne), puis mena une double carrière de pianiste-concertiste et de compositeur. De plus, en 1914, il enseigna le piano et la composition au Conservatoire de Mannheim, avant de servir dans l'armée allemande durant la Première Guerre mondiale. Celle-ci achevée, il revint à Mannheim, en 1928, s'installa à Berlin avec sa famille. De religion juive, l'avènement du nazisme en 1933 le contraint à fuir l'Allemagne. Après un court passage à Paris et à Londres, il s'exila en 1934 aux États-Unis, où il s'établit définitivement.