Czerny Cpo

Kolja Lessing, one of the most versatile musicians of our time, has energized music culture with significant impulses as a violinist and pianist who combines interpretive and scholarly work. For cpo he has now recorded two violin sonatas by Carl Czerny. After producing several violin and piano sonatas Czerny wrote his grand Sonata Concertante in four movements in 1848, the year of the failed revolution. The contrast to his first Violin Sonata of 1807, a work of his youth, could hardly be greater: reconsideration of Mozartian rhetoric and compositional technique mark this work pulsing with astonishing kinetic energy and with a concertante character for the most part embodied by the piano, while the violin part instead is assigned more the role of brilliant commentary or pointed interaction.

This affordable CD contains works by four pianist/composers who all knew and admired Beethoven. Except for the von Lichnowsky Variations, each of the included works is scored for a piano and a medium sized collection of instruments (two octets and one nonet), resulting in a texture somewhere between a piano trio and a concerto. The piano is featured in all the compositions, much like Beethoven's Septet. The recording has minimal reverberation, giving the disc the overall impression of a chamber recital.

In his Opus 300 Carl Czerny compiled a unique keyboard compendium of all the stylistic facets of European music from the Baroque until far into the Romantic era – an audio history of music en miniature featuring preludes as our guides and an overwhelming variety of characters, forms, and pianistic invention. The 120 finely chiseled preludes range from the aphoristic extreme of ten to twenty seconds in length to the just as aphoristically packed narrative and rhapsodic forms of a maximum of three to four minutes. Their numerical midpoint is formed by sixteen very short interludes that are brilliant examples of modulations, each proceeding from C major to all the other major keys. Like most of the preludes from No. 60 to No. 71, they represent variants of this art form originally distinguished by improvisation: as interludes they build audio bridges from one (imaginary) work to the next and link what would appear to be beyond linking. The work of course is interpreted in its entirety on two CDs – by none other than Kolja Lessing, one of the most versatile musicians of our times and a violinist and pianist who combines interpretive and musicological work in his many significant contributions to music culture.

Following the great successes of his recently released Czerny CDs, Kolja Lessing now dedicates himself to a most highly interesting new project in his capacity as a pianist. He interprets piano music by modern Israeli composers such as Joachim Stutschewsky, Sergiu Natra, Mordecai Seter, and Tzvi Avni. The last-mentioned composer has repeatedly turned to the piano, and his rich oeuvre for this instrument reflects all the changes that he has lived through as well as the diverse personal, artistic, and political experience that he has gathered during the course of his compositional career, which now spans seven decades. Against this background the two piano compositions by Avni from the most recent years, the In Spite of All That: Sonata brevis (2014) and the Dedication composed in 2016 for the hundredth anniversary of the birth of his teacher Mordecai Seter, assume the character of autobiographical statements.