Only Piano

Ella Fitzgerald - The Complete Piano Duets (2020) {2CD Set, Verve B0031519-02}
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© 2020 Verve / Universal | B0031519-02
Jazz / Vocal Jazz / Standards / Piano

Many of the most beautiful recordings in Ella Fitzgerald's catalog were her duets with pianists. The freedom afforded by this simple configuration resulted in some of her most sensitive, affecting and heartfelt work. This collection assembles every recording Ella made in the piano duo format - for the Decca, Verve and Pablo labels. It includes 1950's Ella Sings Gershwin, 1954's Songs In A Mellow Mood and 1956's Let No Man Write My Epitaph, all in one package for the first time.

This performance of the piano concerto is cherishable. It was not a work I knew when I bought this record but I fell in love with it quickly. It is by no means a second rank work - it belongs next to the wonderful Schumann piano concerto. At least that must be the conclusion of anyone listening to this magical performance.

It would very much seem that the 19th- and 20th-century Czech piano concerto repertoire begins and ends with Dvořák and Martinů. The present recording, however, serves to prove that this is far from being the case. It contains three piano concertos that have been – undeservedly – overlooked. Vítězslava Kaprálová wrote the Piano Concerto in D minor, characterised by brilliant instrumentation and an engrossing solo part, at the age of 20 as her graduation work.

Hailed by the magazine BBC Music for its ‘generous and warm-hearted, utterly beguiling playing’, the Neave Trio has emerged as one of the finest young ensembles of its generation. It has been praised by WQXR Radio in New York City for its ‘bright and radiant music making’, described by The Strad as having ‘elegant phrasing and deft control of textures’, and praised by The New York Times for its ‘excellent performances’. Here, the trio presents a programme of music connected by the theme of Remembrance. Rachmaninoff’s early first piano trio was inspired by Tchaikovsky’s trio in A minor, and shows illuminating glimpses of the mature composer to come. The elegiac mood of Rachmaninoff’s work is matched by that of Brahms’s first trio – again an early composition – which was inspired by the composer’s (unrequited) feelings for Clara Schumann.

Alexis Weissenberg, like Howard Shelley on Hyperion, couples the First Sonata and the revised version of the Second. There's little doubt that Rachmaninov improved parts of it texturally when he looked at it again in 1931, but whether he did the right thing in paring down the work so ruthlessly is another matter. If you're happy with the revision there's a simple choice between this disc and the Shelley, and in this case the decision is dear. Shelley may lack some of the force and whirlwind brilliance of Weissenberg, but when the latter's dynamic contrasts sometimes border on the crude (Rachmaninov's markings in the opening of No. 1 are only piano-forte) Shelley's restraint comes as something of a relief.

Musical institutions have their funny ideas, and the quirk of the Prague Conservatoire in the 1880s was that if you were an instrumentalist you couldn't be a composer, too (evidently no one had told them about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin et al). At his father's insistence Léhar was enrolled as a violinist, but his real interest lay in composition. He took a few secret lessons from Fibich and had the opportunity to play his D minor sonata to Dvorak, who urged him to give up the violin and switch to the composition classes. But Léhar senior was adamant and Lèhar is to be considered as practically a self-taught composer.

Giacomo Orefice is best known as an opera composer. His piano output mainly consists of evocative short pieces that draw inspiration from poetry and paintings, as well as landscapes, nature, and scenes from daily life. The childlike atmosphere of Ninnoli is followed by the delightful Valse des amoureuses, Orefice's only piano piece published outside Italy. The Preludi del mare describe a day at the seaside from the first lights of dawn to the rising of the moon. These impressionist worlds are enhanced in the Quadri di Böcklin by a sound palette that expresses the symbolist painter's moods of sorrow and solitude. The melancholy Cipressi, a piece of unknown origin, is now seen as Orefice's musical epitaph.