Frédéric Lordopn

Three 20th-century orchestral scores, Bartók’s Two Pictures, Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, all dating from 1910-13 and all linked (as the detailed CD booklet explains), are brought to life in the hands of two exceptional French pianists. The central interest is the ballet Jeux. One of the world’s outstanding Debussy interpreters, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has added to his complete Chandos recordings with his own transcription for two pianos. Written late in Debussy’s life for Nijinsky, Jeux involves an emotionally erotic and harmonically daring game of tennis. Bavouzet and his well-matched partner, François-Fréderic Guy, play with nimble grace, capturing the works wit and mystery. This gripping album is dedicated to Pierre Boulez, guru and enabler, for his 90th birthday.

Beethoven constantly calls into question and modifies the notion of time in sonata form. He never repeats himself. The thirty-two sonatas are like a voyage of initiation that runs throughout his creative career, displaying his endlessly inventive imagination. After Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and Sonata in B minor, François- Frédéric Guy offers us a complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, recorded in public at the Arsenal in Metz. This set is the first volume. ‘To play the complete Beethoven sonatas in public represents the most exhilarating project I have attempted, a tremendous artistic and human challenge. Beethoven explores sonic and poetic regions that in my view still remain, even in the early twenty-first century, his “exclusive territory”.

Pianist/composer Conrad Tao's third Warner Classics album, entitled American Rage, traces the roots of rebellion from the 1930s Harlan County labor disputes, through the trauma of 9/11, to the deep divisions of the present day. Bookended by two expansive works by Frederic Rzewski - Which Side Are You On?, based on Florence Reece’s 1931 protest song, and Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, an industrial folk song that reflects the unjust factory working conditions - the album centres on Julia Wolfe's Compassion, written in the wake of 9/11, and Aaron Copland's elegiac Piano Sonata.