Solo Piano

Irish pianist Barry Douglas has largely avoided recording, but has made a substantial reputation on the concert stage. You'd think he might have cultivated a commanding, public style, but in this first-in-a-series album of Brahms piano works, he instead offers quiet, finely wrought interpretations. The programming concept itself is a bit involved, but Douglas pulls it off: instead of offering short works in complete sets, he picks and chooses in order to create a convincing sequence of moods and modes of expression. Here, Douglas sets Brahms' late works against broader works from earlier in the composer's career. His control over the Intermezzo, Capriccio, and Romance sets of Opp. 116, 117, and 118, is extraordinary, and few pianists have ever evoked so well the quintessential reaction to late Brahms: that when you hear the performance just once, you have an uncanny feeling of barely having scratched the surface. In Douglas' hands, the larger Rhapsodies, Op. 79, and the Ballade in B major, Op. 10/4, almost inspire relaxation: here Douglas turns up the volume and revels a bit in the melodies.

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.

In eight previous volumes Ronald Brautigam has traversed what is often called 'The New Testament of Piano Music', namely Beethoven's 32 numbered sonatas. The present disc may be regarded as an appendix to these, as it explores the composer's first attempts in the genre. It opens with the three Kurfürsten Sonatas from 1783, in which Beethoven - at the tender age of twelve - demonstrates a remarkable maturity.

Here is a superb recital following Piers Lane’s earlier Hyperion release of d’Albert piano concertos (4/96) and, once again, provoking astonishment that music of such quality could have lain neglected for so long. Variety is, indeed, the spice of d’Albert (1864-1932), the legendary, six times married pianist so greatly admired by Liszt. Tending to leave his wives as soon as they bore him children (one for the Freudians), his occasional sense of confusion – including an outburst to Teresa Carreno, his second conquest, “Come quickly, my child and your child are fighting with our child” – hardly detracted from a dazzling career and a series of compositions of a special richness.

Although Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems exist in two-piano transcriptions prepared by the composer himself, it was his Czech student August Stradal (1860–1930) who transcribed twelve of them for solo piano – versions which demand almost superhuman virtuosity. Stradal died before he could tackle the last of the symphonic poems, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe; Risto-Matti Marin has made good that lacuna with his own virtuoso transcription, and adds six of Stradal’s transcriptions of Liszt songs for good measure.

Displaying exceptional musical precocity, the young pianist Maria Szymanowska proved a sensation in Warsaw’s salons, before moving to Paris where her fame spread. Greatly admired by her contemporaries, who included Beethoven, Cherubini, Field and Tomášek, she later also cast a spell over the elderly Goethe during one of her many long European tours. Before her early death, from cholera, she was employed by the Russian imperial court as First Pianist to the empress. Written for the aristocratic salons of the day, Szymanowska’s collections of dances are, for the most part, pleasing and light, yet always inventive. These beautifully written miniatures also include more challenging pieces such as the Polonaise No. 4 and the Mazurka No. 17 whose darker moments foreshadow the early German Romantics.

This is Marc-André Hamelin's second recording of the Alkan Concerto for Solo Piano (the first for Music & Arts dates from 1992) and he now trumps his previous ace with a performance of the Concerto of such brilliance and lucidity that one can only listen in awe and amazement.

After eight discs with the 32 numbered sonatas, and a ninth comprising the early sonatas and sonatinas, Ronald Brautigam now embarks on the second leg of his traversal of Beethoven’s complete music for solo piano. In this volume he gives us the complete Bagatelles, and includes not only the three sets published during Beethoven’s life time, but also thirteen further pieces composed throughout Beethoven’s career, between 1795 and 1825. Some of these pieces, most famously ‘Für Elise’, are sometimes referred to as Bagatelles, others simply as Klavierstücke and several of them are only known by their tempo markings.

There was no composer whose works were more frequently passed off as Mozart's than Eberl. Even more surprising is the documented fact that there was no protest from Mozart against the use of his name on Eberl's compositions. Eberl, a friend and (probably) a student of the great man, did mind but was too timid to take action until after Mozart had died. Finally, he published a notice in a widely read German newspaper claiming ownership of a number of his compositions attributed to Mozart. Despite this, his works still continued to be published under Mozart's name. This in itself is a telling indication as to the contemporary opinion of the quality of Eberl's works, but critical reviews of his day also spoke of works published under his own name reaching the heights of Haydn's, Mozart's and the young Beethoven's.