Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Brasileiro: Villa-Lobos, Guarnieri, Mignone, Santoro et al (Nelson Freire)

The Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire made his initial impression on collectors with a recording of music by his compatriot Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). That Teldec disc included the Prole do Bebê Suites and the massive Rudepoema. After partnering Martha Argerich in two-piano works, Freire was absent from the catalogues for two decades, finally to reappear with a series of acclaimed recordings of Beethoven and Brahms. Now, after 40 years, he returns to the music of his homeland. The result is playing of such freshness, spontaneity and vigour that you would think no time had passed. This disc is clearly a labour of love. While Villa-Lobos gets the lion’s share of the generous program, it also contains pieces by older composers, which Freire tells us have been in his repertoire since he was a teenager (he was born in 1944). Among these are the Tango Brasileiro by the un-Hispanically named Alexandre Levy, the Valse Lent by Henrique Fernández and Camargo Guarnieri’s popular Dança Negro. While they don’t have the profile of Villa-Lobos, the other composers represented here are hardly unknown, as the sleeve note claims. Villa-Lobos selections include the bubbling Carnaval das Crianças, more familiar in its piano and orchestra version under…

November 14, 2012
Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Valentina Lisitsa: Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Behold the quintessential 21st-century classical musician, Valentina Lisitsa, an American-based Ukrainian whose homemade videos have garnered 50 million YouTube hits (and counting), and forged for the formerly unemployed pianist an international career that culminated in this recital in June at the Royal Albert Hall. Decca are the Johnny-Come-Latelys in all of this, but have given it the due sense of urgency, releasing the completed package online just a week after YouTube viewers had watched the whole thing unfolding live. Minor-league pianists making such a dramatic leap to major success usually have some marketable eccentricity, like a potty mouth or a tragic autobiography or a swimsuit model’s figure, but aside from a shock of blonde hair à la Claudia Schiffer, Lisitsa doesn’t. What she does have, though, is a sincerity about her playing and an ability to communicate with her audiences visually and emotionally, together with a refreshingly olde-worlde technique honed in the East European tradition of Josef Hofmann and Rachmaninov. Purists will still find plenty to hate about her playing, especially her stilted Chopin, but she has more than enough artistic credibility to take on the kind of repertoire featured here in this plebiscite concert programmed, naturally enough, by… Continue…

November 2, 2012
Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Konstantin Shamray in Recital (Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Prokofiev)

Released to coincide with this year’s Sydney International Piano Competition, this disc of Russian music showcases a previous winner. In 2008, Konstantine Shamray won not only the First Prize but also the People’s Choice award. Listen to the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Sonata and you will understand the excitement caused by this young pianist. The piano was not Tchaikovsky’s natural medium, and parts of his sonata of 1878 sound like the keyboard reduction of a symphony. Understanding this, Shamray revels in the quasi-orchestral gestures of the first movement (Chopin’s heroics a clear influence), and savours the dark lyricism of the slow movement. In the fleet scherzo and dazzling finale his light touch impresses. A crucial section of the scherzo involves the repetition of a simple melodic figure with a descending scale in the bass. This passage could easily sound trivial, but so spry is the pianist’s response that instead it sparkles. He creates a mood of half-lights and shadows most effectively in four late pieces by Scriabin, especially the Feuillet d’album. Scriabin’s fragrant, introverted music is as impressionistic as anything by Debussy. By contrast, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No 8 occupies a more robust emotional terrain. The third of Prokofiev’s so-called…

September 19, 2012