Takako Arai

This album is a Rachmaninoff piano duo album by Miku Omine, who has made Rachmaninoff his life's work and whose performances and album are highly acclaimed, and Takako Takahashi, who won 5th place at the 12th International Chopin Piano Competition. In a live recording held at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan on October 20, 2023, two suites by Rachmaninoff, which can be said to be the pinnacle of two-piano works, and a suite of Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty" arranged by Rachmaninoff for duet were recorded.

Cui, a member of the original Russian 'Five', was a dedicated encourager of the other members of the group (and indeed of all living Russian composers) to aim at less imitation of the West; and instead to write, without inhibition, more obviously independent Russian-style music. Nevertheless, he seemed to exempt himself from the encouragement, tending to write his own music in a pretty well accepted western European mould.

The G major Anton Rubinstein violin concerto is a fine and powerful work, quite as good as many a lesser-known Russian example in the same genre, and easily as deserving of wider currency as, say, the Taneyev Suite de Concert, which is just as rarely heard these days. Nishizaki gives a committed and polished reading, though you often feel that this is music written by a pianist who had marginally less facility when writing for the violin. Still, here’s a well-schooled performance, full of agreeable touches of imagination (the Andante shows Nishizaki’s fine-spun tone to particularly good effect) delivered with crisply economical urgency that makes good musical sense even of the work’s plainer and less idiomatic passages.

Vivaldi was prolific, composing vast quantities of instrumental and vocal music and nearly fifty operas. Of the 500 concertos he wrote the most popular in his life-time as today were the four known as Le Quattro Stagioni - The Four Seasons, works that had circulated widely in manuscript before being published in Amsterdam in 1725, when explanatory poems were added to clarify the programme of each concerto. The set was dedicated to Count Wenzel von Morzin, a cousin of Haydn's first patron. The title page describes Vivaldi himself as the Count's "maestro in Italia', as "Maestro de' Concerti" of the Pieta, as well as "Maestro di Capella di Camera" of Prince Philip, Land grave of Hesse-Darmstadt.