In addition to having written the first Viennese operetta, Franz von Suppe was a master of the Italian, French and German styles which he blended like an alchemist to form his own unique, irrepressible compositions. Two imperishable examples are here, the overtures Poet and Peasant and Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna. This album also explores his previously unrecorded Fantasia Symphonica, recently rediscovered in Viennese archives by conductor Ola Rudner, which displays masterful orchestration, distinctive melodies and a mastery of counterpoint. Other rarities complete this fresh look at the breadth of Suppe's ambition.
Igor Levit’s new double album Fantasia features a wide range of works spanning a period of almost two centuries from 1720 to 1910 and showcases key compositions by Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Johann Sebastian Bach and Alban Berg. The starting point of the four paradigmatic works featured on the double album is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Levit has chosen Bach’s exceptional Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor and combined it with Liszt’s B minor Sonata, a highly charged piece that at the time of its composition looked far ahead into the future (which Levit is currently performing to great acclaim all over the world), together with Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, in which Busoni perpetuated the Bach tradition, and Alban Berg’s only Piano Sonata.
…Barrueco has one more trump card to play – his partnership with Placido Domingo in four songs, selected from those for which Rodrigo himself has made adaptations for the guitar of the original piano accompaniments (the texts are given in four languages). Their coming together was no public relations exercise, for both are longstanding devotees of Rodrigo’s music, and it shows. The partnership extends through the whole of this recording, in which Domingo also conducts the orchestra, an exercise in which both parties demonstrate their happy meeting of minds.'
Reviewed: Gramophone 4/1998, John Duarte
These two works form a perfect, contrasting pairing of the two most sublime piano compositions for four hands in existence: the Mozart ineffably sunny yet majestic, in a brilliant D major, the Schubert Fantasia achingly melancholy and beautiful, played by two musicians who are characterised by expressive understatement. In my experience, Lupu has since, in later years, become inclined to give detached, almost indifferent performances which verge on the remote, whereas here he and Perahia play with both strength and delicacy without ever giving in to excessive rubato or cheap, overt emotionalism.