Most piano duet arrangements were meant for the home rather than the concert hall. When you sight-read orchestral reductions at the piano, your physical involvement with the material “fills in” the missing instrumental color. Even with skillful four-hand “de-orchestrations” like Max Reger’s of the Bach Orchestral Suites, listeners run the risk of “registral fatigue”. In the main, the Speidel-Trenkner piano duo circumvents these limitations through canny pianistic means. In the C major Suite’s Forlane, for example, the oboe’s hornpipe-like melody bounces on a featherweight accompaniment.
Here is another fine recording of Telemann’s magnificent Thunder Ode, a work inspired by the catastrophic earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755. It is coupled with one of the composer’s most jubilant cantatas, and both still impress as works that should be heard much more often, perhaps in lieu of an overplayed composition by Handel or Bach. They are surely in that league. This CD, re-issued in Chandos’ “Chaconne” line, faces inevitable comparison with the performances on Capriccio, conducted by Hermann Max, although the couplings are different. Max’s Thunder Ode is given a whole CD to itself, while his cantata recording contains two additional, and magnificent, Telemann compositions.
Two leaders from very different musical worlds, the innovative pianist Bruce Brubaker and scientist-now-electronic-artist Max Cooper collaborate to create this latest expression of music by Philip Glass and tell a story of diversity and vulnerability.
Johann Heinrich Rolle belongs to the generation of J. S. Bach’s elder sons. Pipped at the post by C. P. E. Bach as Telemann’s successor in Hamburg, Rolle centred his musical life round Berlin and his native Magdeburg. Recitatives, arias, duets and choruses make up this two-part music drama which is both lyrical and on occasion vividly pictorial in its imagery. A fine performance.