Leonie Lastella

Leonie Karatas' debut album is dedicated to the solo work of the Czech composer Vitezslava Kaprálová and is the prelude to a series of further recordings which will be dedicated to the work of individual female composers.

Following young pianist Leonie Karatas’ debut CD "La Vita", her second album “Suspense” is dedicated to the great composers of the Romantic period: Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. Schubert's last piano sonata is considered to have paved the way to the High Romantic full stop, and in combination with Liszt's most important piano sonata as the virtuoso climax of the Romantic piano literature, this piano concerto offers a musical treat.

Götz Friedrich’s 1981 Elektra film sets Richard Strauss’ opera in a dark and dingy abandoned 20th-century factory populated by grungy denizens in psuedo-Greek garb. Elektra herself appears like some deranged homeless woman reeking with sweat and slime (in the rain). And the depravity doesn’t stop there. Friedrich plays up the work’s sado-masochistic elements, with bloody whippings and an orgy sequence involving nude lesbians bathing themselves in the blood of a sacrificial ram. Now you might think that all of this detracts from the score, but on the contrary, the production matches image to music so brilliantly that anyone seeing this opera for the first time would think they were created for each other (which allows you to ignore the occasional useless, almost silly gesture, such as the frequent and prolonged shots of Agamemnon’s bloodied visage during Elektra’s opening monologue).