Maria Eckermann

The Andalusian singer’s debut brushes electronic beats and R&B melodies over a flamenco canvas. It is a masterful meditation on ancestral struggle that looks back to find a way forward.

The time I felt an explosion of musical love, was when through the hands and sounds of my favorite Brazilian pianist Luis Eca, I saw, heard and felt a colored flash of beauty, harmonious, sensual, loving, sweet, bitter, irritating. We discovered that music was a woman; assertive, urgent, possessive, dominant, explosive, but always bringing and explosive, powerful discovery, that by mixing bodies and souls without hesitation, you reach that desired target. Even today I'm fascianted by the strength and power of the musicians sounds in relation to our sensibility.

Poèmes are wayfarers crossing borders between language and music. What had mostly been called Lied\/Song before, has often been seen as poems in the past 200 years: Richard Wagner gave his Wesendonck\-Liedern the titel Five Poems for Female Voice and Piano and Francis Poulenc composed around 30 Poèmes to be sung and accompanied musically. Just as with Lied, which also exists without words (Mendelssohn\-Bartholdy), a Poème does not necessarily have to be based on a text. Alexander Scriabin, for example, composed 20 Poèmes for piano solo at the beginning of the last century. Francis Poulenc, the Janus\-headed French composer, is difficult to grasp it is impossible to peg a label on him. Yet, he has always remained stylistically faithful in his adherence to tonality, the empasis on melodic elements, the refined simplicity of texture and his effort for clarity and comprehensibilty true to his motto: There is also room for new music , that does not mind applying the chords of other people.

The Portuguese pianist Maria Joa?o Pires has long been associated with the music of Mozart. Her delicacy of touch, vibrancy of phrasing and sense of fantasy mark her out as one of the elect who can touch his keyboard music without coarsening or sim- plifying it. She has made two complete cycles of the sonatas; reissued here is the first one, from the days in the 1970s when she first appeared on the international scene and won over listeners with a graceful purity of approach that left more famous names trailing in her wake.The later cycle brought added refinement, but anyone who is captivated by this still undervalued corpus – too difficult for beginners, yet scorned by many professionals in search of gaudier glories – will want to hear this set.

Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole … Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.