Bass Etudes

Kevin Volans is probably most famous for the 1984 Kronos reworking of White Man Sleeps. His beginnings in South Africa to the Neue Einfacheit (in English, New Simplicity) of West Germany with the theorist Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose seminal sine-waves and soundscapes shaped the landscape we understand in electronic music today, are well-documented. The Man With Footsoles of Wind, an opera about the enterprise of the influential poet Arthur Rimbaud in Ethiopia, remains very much on my ‘listening wishlist’. Volans is obviously a musicologist. He is undoubtedly a modernist. This is 2022. He has offered us Études, a collection of his own previously unreleased solo piano works performed by Jill Richards and a second-half where he performs Liszt. The listener has been invited into “a sound world” with “extremely complex and challenging arrangements”.

Nicolai Lugansky’s solo disc debut for Erato is more than just another recording of the Chopin etudes by a new virtuoso on the block. He’s got fingers, to be sure, but also a mind, an ear, and more than a little imagination. The pianist guides Op. 10 No. 1’s arpeggio sequences with a pliable, singing bass line, and offsets Op. 10 No. 2’s murmuring right-hand 16th-notes with intelligently shaped left-hand chords. Similarly, your ear gravitates more toward Op. 10 No. 7’s playful left-hand accents and dynamic jolts rather than to Luagnsky’s suave dispatch of the right hand’s rapid double notes.

Debussy's Études are really the only set that deserves to be put beside Chopin's. What makes them so special? Like his, they are truly "practice pieces," systematically exploring various aspects of keyboard technique. But at the same time, they are poetic works of art, full of fantasy, charm, and musical invention. Uchida's recording is almost universally regarded as the finest version of these works to appear in modern times. Her playing combines effortless virtuosity with pianistic precision, keeping the music's artistic and pedagogical tendencies in a state of exquisite tension. This disc also established Uchida's claim to be recognized as one of the most interesting and talented pianists now active. You need to hear it.

Evgeny Kissin, in case you missed the New Year's Eve international telecast from Berlin, is an 18-year-old Russian who is already the veteran of many a 'sensational' debut. As he proved in his accompaniment to Karajan's Tchaikovsky, he is already a considerable artist, with all the traditional Russian strengths of deep tone production, strong rhythm, clarity and expressiveness even under extreme virtuoso pressure. His Rachmaninov gives further evidence of an outstanding talent which one hopes his advisers, RCA included, will nurture patiently.

Say you start a group called the Society for New Music, commission composer-stars-in-the-making and do it for thirty years straight, you might expect your scrapbooks to be quite interesting. What you might not realize is that your efforts now constitute a major segment of the backbone of contemporary American concert music and you have premiered a boatload of chamber works by composers who have gone on to distinguished careers. Such is the case with Syracuse’s Society for New Music founded by Neva Pilgrim, who opened their treasure chest of commissioned works from 1972 – 2002 and has put them together as the 5-CD set entitled “American Masters for the 21st Century.”

Over a remarkably long and illustrious career, Camille Saint-Saëns thrilled audiences around the world as a pianist and organist, shaped the course of musical life in France, and enriched a multitude of genres with some 600 works, all bearing witness to the mastery of his craft. Setting his best-known compositions in their dazzlingly diverse context, this edition invites exploration and discovery. It spans more than a century of recording history, encompassing a host of great instrumentalists, singers, conductors and orchestras, many of them from France. Setting the pace, in performances from as early as 1904, is the composer himself.

Anda retrospectives continue to prove salutary. Testament has devoted a number of important re-releases to him, and there is fortunately not much duplication between them and this DG boxed set of five discs – Kreisleriana and the later Symphonic Etudes. The kernel of this set is Schumann augmented by Bartók, though not one of the more well-known Anda recordings, and his famed Brahms B flat major Concerto, and a wartime record of which he was greatly proud, the Franck Symphonic Variations. There’s also the not inconsiderable pleasure of listening to him in Chopin, in the Diabelli variations, a Schubert sonata and in some Liszt recorded at various times during his career.