Bogdan Laketic - D'ase Liszt Haydn & Schoenbe - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

R. Schumann - Mahler Symphonies 1 & 2 [COMPACT DISCS] date 03/25/1994

Born in 1994, the British pianist Tyler Hay is a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music where he continues his studies with the eminent piano pedagogue Niel Immermann. He already has an impressive concert diary of recitals and concertos throughout the UK and beyond this is his debut recital, concentrating on a composer for whom he feels a particular affinity. Indeed his advocacy of Liszt has been recognised in the Liszt Society Competition in November 2016, when he won first prize. Tyler Hay's Liszt recital ranges over the composer's protean output. It opens with the Gothic splendour and intricate counterpoint of the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H but immediately continues in the much more intimate and elusive idiom of the first of the Valses oubliées, which are dispersed like hidden treasure throughout the album. Composed between 1881 and 1885, the Valses are fully representative examples of a 'late style' in Liszt, reflective mood-paintings that shift between pensiveness, resignation, and reverie. More extrovert works are interleaved with them. Tyler Hay plays Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este, the shimmering masterpiece of tone-color from the second book of the Années de pèlerinage. There is also the pianistic thunder and lightning of the First Mephisto Waltz, and the D flat major First Ballade, before a return to Gothic grandeur and Bach with the Variations on 'Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen'. Tyler Hay closes this assured debut recital, appropriately enough, with a farewell the Abschied which is a setting of a Russian folksong supplied to Liszt by his pupil Alexander Siloti a model of quiet simplicity and one of the composer's most touching miniatures.

Songs of Solitude was conceived by the violist Hiyoli Togawa at a time when a virus was forcing people across the world into isolation and she herself needed to find a new rhythm of life as concert after concert was being cancelled. As she relates in the booklet to the disc, playing Bach - music that combines powerful emotions with a crystal-clear structure - became part of her daily routine, along with walks along the empty streets of Berlin. During these, the importance of remaining creative became even clearer to her, along with the idea to offer people the opportunity through music to reflect upon the difficulties of living through a pandemic. Having recently collaborated with the composer Kalevi Aho, she came upon the idea of asking him and a number of other composers to write for her - pieces that would 'reflect life and work in the time of the coronavirus and that distil isolation in music'. The result is Songs of Solitude - works for solo viola commissioned from 11 different composers and interwoven with sarabandes from Bach's cello suites. The individual pieces range from the meditative (Toshio Hosokawa reminiscing in his version of the traditional Sakura) to the defiant (Johanna Doderer's Shadows). Some of them even provided Hiyoli with musical company - Aho's Am Horizont requires her to play two parts on the viola while singing a third, and the piece by John Powell is written for nine voices, recorded in multitrack. The album was recorded in Berlin during three periods, June to October 2020, as the various pieces arrived and the restrictions in place at the time permitted.