Vittorio Bresciani Liszt Schubert Song Transcriptions

Trumpet was meant to have a bright future after Handel and Bach, but history decided otherwise. Relegated to a military signal role with timpani, it had to wait until the later Romantic period to flourish once again. A brainchild of Andrew Balio, this album showcases his own transcriptions of works from the golden age of chamber music, inviting trumpeters out of the cold and into the cozy world of Brahms, Schumann, and Schubert. Pianist John Wilson partners Andrew for these new arrangements of Brahms's clarinet sonatas, Schumann's Adagio and Allegro, and Marchenbilder, and Schubert's lied 'Auf dem Strom', in which tenor Nicholas Phan gives voice to the text. Thanks to Andrew, trumpeters and music lovers can now enjoy an expanded repertoire which invites us into an entirely new soundworld.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a symbol of tolerance and understanding between people, opens with Jörg Widman’s Con brio and are then joined by the legendary Martha Argerich for Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1. The extraordinary concert is completed with popular excerpts from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Meistersinger and Ring der Nibelungen.

Rachmaninov's songs for voice and piano count among his most heartfelt and beautiful compositions. Since his better-known piano preludes ooze melody from their every pore, why not adapt the songs for solo piano and you'll have what amounts to an additional set of Rachmaninov preludes? That's precisely what Earl Wild did with 13 of these gems. He doesn't merely weld the vocal lines onto the original piano accompaniments; instead, he fleshes out the textures in a style very much in keeping with the lush polyphony and galvanic rhythm typical of Rachmaninov's solo keyboard writing. And nobody plays Earl Wild transcriptions better than Earl Wild. From the bristling cascades in "The Little Island" to the wistful long lines and pent-up agitation of the familiar "Vocalise", Wild's unerring sense of style and utterly natural, singing technique hold your attention.

Rudolf Buchbinder, the doyen of Austrian pianists, plays Max Reger’s rarely heard, lovingly crafted transcriptions of his idol Johannes Brahms’s most beautiful lieder, about which Reger said: “In the case of such masterpieces, any embellishment and any attempt to introduce a note of brilliance would be an unheard-of act of vandalism. I mean to adopt a different approach by bringing out the vocal line and, where possible, retaining the original accompaniment in the most faithful way that I can!”

Rudolf Buchbinder, the doyen of Austrian pianists, plays Max Reger’s rarely heard, lovingly crafted transcriptions of his idol Johannes Brahms’s most beautiful lieder, about which Reger said: “In the case of such masterpieces, any embellishment and any attempt to introduce a note of brilliance would be an unheard-of act of vandalism. I mean to adopt a different approach by bringing out the vocal line and, where possible, retaining the original accompaniment in the most faithful way that I can!”

Tchaikovsky wrote over 100 lyric art songs or Romances, a sequence of diaries of the soul that embrace moods from euphoria to despair. They were unusually important to him, and he, or his editors, commissioned piano transcriptions by eminent musicians such as Laub and others, all of which were revised by Tchaikovsky. These poetic and melodically beautiful songs, many of which are here recorded for the first time, include the ravishing None but the Lonely Heart and reveal a ‘new’ body of Tchaikovsky’s piano repertoire. The album concludes with an opera fantasy on themes from Eugene Onegin by the Austrian composer and pianist Carl Frühling.