Susan Varley

You really have to hear this CD of Brahms Three Violin Sonatas. Krysia Osostowicz's violin playing is wonderful and Susan Tomes piano playing is remarkable, there are times when she makes the piano sound like pizzicato strings, I'm not fooling its amazing. These two musicians are first rate.

This is Susan Wong's third album. It was released in 2010 and, according to her label Evosound, was recorded in Geneva, Switzerland with producer Adrien Zerbini and features Spanish guitar maestro and arranger Ignacio Lamas. It was mixed by Yvan Bing (co-producer of Phil Collins new hit album) and mastered by Bernie Grundman in Hollywood, USA.

No, not another Mozart piano concerto disc! No indeed, for this pioneering recording gives us intimate, almost domestic versions of three of the composer’s masterpieces, versions that have scarcely been played, let alone set to disc, in the modern concert era. Moreover they give us the opportunity to hear Susan Tomes show her mettle in strong light as concerto soloist—and bring to a wider repertoire the distinct communicative magic that has made her one of the foremost chamber pianists of today.

John Holloway and Davitt Moroney have set up a musically rewarding partnership in these brilliantly inventive works, furthermore adding to their programme the two lovely sonatas for violin and continuo long attributed to Bach, and justly so. In both of them they are joined by Susan Sheppard (continuo cello). For these sonatas Moroney has preferred a chamber organ to a harpsichord.

The Mendelssohn sonatas are established standard repertoire items for most organists. Comminssioned in London as Voluntaries and then published simultaneously in four different countries, they are notable for their lack of consistent form, ranging from two to four movements, and eight to fifteen minutes in length. Scottish organist Susan Landale graduated from Edinburgh University and then continued her studies with the great French organist Andre Marchal in Paris. She was later appointed organist of St. George's Anglican Church, Paris, a post she held for eighteen years.

With her new programme "L'amour, la mort, la mer" Patricia Petibon flies freely from one register to another, from one language to another, and from one style to its exact opposite. However, she does base her repertoire around her own personal journey. This is what grants her seemingly eclectic style the consistency of an unparalleled performance. It is less a recital than a story that unfolds from one composer to the next—a secret story of grief, travel, and solitude. In this way, she echoes the idea underpinning Saint- John Perse’s poem, Amers: “The tragedians came down from the quarries.