Piano Baroque

Hyperion's series of recordings of Bach transcriptions continues with this superlative release by Hamish Milne. While earlier volumes had featured the transcriptions of Busoni, Feinberg, Friedman, and Grainger, this volume features transcriptions by Russian composers. And, as with earlier volumes, the transcriptions reveal more about the transcriber than they do about the composer. In the case of Siloti's transcriptions of the Prelude in B minor and the Air from the Third Orchestral Suite, we find a transcriber of strength and delicacy, of massive sonorities and ethereal melodies.

Wilhelm Kempff (1895–1991), one of the great piano masters, receives an exceptional tribute from the label with which he was most closely associated. This is a beautiful, limited-edition 35-CD box of Kempff’s complete solo repertoire on DG and Decca Classics. It includes the stereo Beethoven sonata cycle, the Schubert sonata cycle, generous anthologies of Bach, Brahms, Liszt, Schubert, and Schumann – plus Chopin and Baroque. There are many rarities, not readily available at present.

Martin Stadtfeld's new double album "Baroque Colours" presents a colorful sound panorama of the Baroque - with original works from Bach to Rameau as well as his own arrangements of well-known Baroque hits and unknown musical gems.

Keith Jarrett & Michelle Makarski – Johann Sebastian Bach: Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano (2013) {2CD ECM New Series 2230/31}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 443 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 227 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 34 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2013 ECM Records | ECM New Series 2230/31
Classical / Baroque / Chamber Music

Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett has recorded Bach before, on both piano and harpsichord. His interpretations are not jazz versions of Bach but are played straight. In this case you might say relatively straight, for Bach's sonatas for violin and keyboard, BWV 1014-1019, were written for a harpsichord and are generally played that way; somehow the ear is jarred more by the piano here than in Bach's solo keyboard music (which Jarrett has also recorded). Jarrett fans will find the evidence of his characteristic style not in rhythmic inflections toward jazz but in his way of sustaining notes, which is never excessive.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, for the silk, lace and velvet outfits worn by the members of the Eroica Trio in the booklet photos do at least hint at the nature of the music-making on the disc. This is baroque repertoire played in an unabashedly old-fashioned way, warm and genteel, soft phrases delivered at stately tempos with lush vibrato, not a hint of the spare-toned edginess of many authentic instruments practitioners. The romantic attitude is most strongly conveyed in the two well-known works heard in arrangements, the grandly tragic Adagio of Tommaso Albinoni and the dramatic Chaconne from J. S. Bach's D minor Partita, which here almost sounds more like a work of the 19th century than the 18th. The three trio sonatas by Antonio Vivaldi, his compatriot and contemporary Antonio Lotti and Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Loeillet, are somewhat less arresting pieces but still given lovely, affectionate performances.