Ronald Gorevic

Most of the world remembers Ronald Reagan and Nancy (Davis) Reagan as geriatric figures in the White House in the 1980s. And it remembers Jane Wyman as the fierce empress, Angela Channing, in the decade’s hit TV series, Falcon Crest.

Violist Ronald Carbone has had a diverse musical life encompassing chamber music, orchestral and solo performances, as well as recording.

Between 2003 and 2015, Ronald Brautigam recorded all of Beethoven’s music for solo piano – a huge undertaking resulting in a grand total of 15 highly acclaimed albums. Choosing to perform the works on the fortepiano, Brautigam began with a sonata cycle which caused one reviewer to talk of a challenge to ‘the very notion of playing this music on modern instruments, a stylistic paradigm shift.’ In 2010, after nine albums of sonatas, he went on to record the composer’s variations, bagatelles and other piano pieces – a staggering array of works ranging from a Bagatelle lasting 11 seconds to the monumental Diabelli Variations, and from a charming Rondo in C major composed by a 13-year old Beethoven, to what is often referred to as the composer's ‘Last Musical Thought’, an Andante maestoso dated 1826.

Letters from Lony tells the story of Leonie (‘Lony’) Rabl in her own words. A German- Jewish exile from Nazism, she ran the Café de Paris in Amsterdam, writing when she could to her daughter and family, safe in England; two further letters survive from after her deportation, on the journey that took her via Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Ronald Corp sets Lony’s letters as accompanied arioso, all the more moving for its understatement.

This is the ninth installment in Ronald Brautigam's series of the complete piano concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. As on previous discs, Brautigam whose 'muscular yet sensitively nuanced command of Mozartian discourse' (BBC Music Magazine) is supported by Die Kölner Akademie under Michael Alexander Willens. The opening work on this installment is the C major concerto, K 415, which was first performed on 23rd March 1783 in the presence of Emperor Joseph II. K 415 was composed in conjunction with the Concerto No. 11 in F major, K 413, which in contrast is a more intimate creation, especially in its Larghetto middle movement, in which Mozart achieves some of his most memorable writing, with the various textures of the orchestra providing a cushion of sound for a delicious cantabile aria for the piano a model that was to become almost a trademark of his later concerto slow movements. The disc closes with Concerto No. 8 in C major, K 246, composed some six years earlier. Mozart wrote it for Countess Antonia Lützow, one of his father's pupils, and in terms of technical difficulty, it is among the least demanding of his piano concertos which nevertheless didn't stop Mozart from performing it himself on several occasions.

In the 1960s transitioning from acting to politics was rare. Ronald Reagan was not the first to do it, but he was the first to jump from the screen to the stump and on to credibility as a presidential contender. Reagan's transformation from struggling liberal actor to influential conservative spokesman in five years—and then to the California governorship six years later—is a remarkable and compelling story.