Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Beethoven • Czerny • Liszt: Bagatelles, Piano Sonatas, Variations on a Theme by Rode (Melvyn Tan)

Carl Czerny was a piano student of Beethoven, and played his teacher’s sonatas as they appeared. As a composer he was responsible for many pieces designed to address specific aspects of piano technique. In time, Czerny taught Liszt and possibly influenced his writing; hence the CD title, Master & Pupil. Melvyn Tan first came to prominence as a proponent of the fortepiano, recording the Beethoven concertos on that instrument in the early 1990s with period-style conductor Roger Norrington. Here Tan plays a modern Steinway, but his classical sensibility remains in terms of polish over profundity. Having said that, he employs appropriately Romantic rubato in both the Beethoven Sonata No 30 and Liszt’s B Minor Sonata, and his overview of those two masterpieces contains much lovely playing, while always remaining in scale. In the Liszt we are probably used to more sheer heft, but Tan’s subtle detail proves engrossing. Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles (his final piano composition) benefit from the simplicity of Tan’s approach; he does not push them out of shape by being over-emotive. To my mind, the pianist is most impressive in the Czerny works: the Variations on a Theme by Rode, and the Funeral March… Continue reading Get unlimited…

July 27, 2017
Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Bach: The Complete Well-Tempered Clavier recorded by key (Ian Holtham)

To record Bach’s “48” complete – 96 intensely-crafted miniatures spanning nearly five hours – is an immense undertaking. Ian Holtham arranges the movements not in the traditional chronology – Book I (1722) then Book II (1742) – but by key. Each key pair has Book I before Book II, save at the half-way point (F minor) and the end (B minor), where he puts the lighter Book II before the profound Book I. His unique ordering exposes many correspondences and relations between the pairs not heard before. Holtham plays Bach insightfully, adding personal ornamentation, tonal shading and articulation. His fugue voicing is always crystal clear, while his delicacy in some of the most archaic fugal types is almost subdued for such grandeur.Rapid pieces are given virtuosic renditions, difficult problems are gracefully solved. In Book II he makes sense of often rambling structures with clever contrasts of articulation and tonal shading: the G Sharp Major Prelude – the only one with f/p marks, almost unrecognisable as Bach – is exquisitely given, bound to the vast triple fugue that follows, a total contrast of introverted chromaticism. Closing with the Book I B Minor Fugue, its subject the first 12-tone row in music,……

July 27, 2017