Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Echo & Return

If Melbourne composer Samuel Smith’s Bleed-through for guitar and laptop is “about” anything, it’s the mutability of memory. It receives its world premiere recording as part of Australian guitarist Callum Henshaw’s debut disc which, taken as a whole, is about the same thing. Smith’s work was inspired by the phenomenon for which it is named.  As magnetic tape deteriorates, its signal infects different layers, resulting in, “a ghostly prediction and recollection of the original signal, itself now significantly diminished… In Bleed-through, the guitar acts as an original signal, becoming surrounded and consumed by the whale song of its own echo.” It’s a spacious, saudade-saturated work, and a perfect end to an echo chamber of a recital resounding with variations on themes, including Henshaw’s own “return” to playing after injury interrupted this recording project. Henshaw, who has numerous awards to his credit, begins his recital with Granados’ Valses Poéticos, delighting in the Spanish composer’s refined chiaroscuro, before moving confidently through Napoléon Coste’s programmatic Le Départ and Manuel Ponce’s unquestioned masterpiece for classical guitar, Variations sur Folia de España et Fugue to the endless vistas of Peter Sculthorpe’s From Kakadu. Henshaw has technique to burn, as evinced by his… Continue reading Get…

November 4, 2016
Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Satie: Piano Music, Volume 1

The contemporary “easy listening” status of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies belie his reputation in his own day as a musical iconoclast and innovator of the first order. And while they are among his earliest compositions, their outrageous simplicity and, in the Gnossiennes, lack of key signatures and bar lines, place them too in those dangerous regions of novelty and experimentation. Prolific pianist Noriko Ogawa, whose Debussy interpretations in particular have won her wide acclaim, begin and end this first volume of the complete piano music of Satie with the above works. What happens in between should prove to those who consider Satie’s music chillax fodder that it is anything but. Ogawa’s tone, tempi and phrasing are just right in the seven Gnossiennes and three Gymnopédies for the more transparent timbre and slightly faster decay of the 1890 Érard grand, she’s chosen to record on. The effect is a languid obsessiveness, a perfumed tension, between the (mainly) simple chordal accompaniments and spare, haunting, modal-inflected melodies. Following the Gnossiennes is what feels like a Dadaist phantasmagoria, beginning with the ragtime march Le Piccadilly and heralding the Gymnopédies with Satie’s own arrangement of his cabaret song, Je te veux, a waltz, which…

November 4, 2016
Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Transcendental: Daniil Trifonov plays Franz Liszt

It took Franz Liszt 26 years to produce the final version of his Twelve Studies in Increasing Degree of Difficulty. The earliest version dates from 1826, but the pianist-phenomenon decided that these pieces were not difficult enough. Other pianists could still manage to play them! The most challenging version of the expanded and elaborated studies appeared in 1837, but the final version of 1852 – dedicated to Czerny – brought a reduction in technical obstacles. Stretches of over a tenth were eliminated, for example. While these 12 Etudes and the others in this recital were designed to showcase Liszt’s superhuman technique, Liszt the poet is still in evidence. Additional to the pyrotechnics lie delicate textures, presaging those of Debussy in terms of color if not harmony. These textures require all the subtlety of nuance that the later composer would demand. Recordings have tended to lean towards one or other extreme. Generally, young pianists use the Etudes to show off their pianistic skill: the young Bolet, Cziffra and Ovchinnikov come to mind. Older pianists stress the poetry and musicality, like Arrau and late Bolet, both in their 70s when they recorded these works. Arrau’s Transcendental Etudes have been… Continue reading Get…

November 2, 2016