Brigitte Helbig - Piano Music 2 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

This new recording of piano works by the London-based Italian composer, pianist and pedagogue Carlo Albanesi, performed by Julia Severus, who also provides the booklet notes, is the first of two volumes exploring his little-known repertoire, and features the Sonata in D minor and Sonata in B flat minor.

The tale of Hans Winterberg (1901-91) is a strange one. A survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, where he had been interned as a Czech Jew, he settled in Munich after the War as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts - but with his death his estate disappeared into a legal limbo, emerging only in 2015. This first album of his piano music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Janácek, Ravel, Schoenberg and other mid-twentieth-century masters, animated by a hard-edged, freewheeling energy and grim humour reminiscent of his close contemporary, Nikos Skalkottas. Brigitte Helbig, who grew up in Munich and also studied there, is one of Germany's livelier young pianists, with a respectable track record in the performance of new music.

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. Andrew Hill's Black Fire is both the pianist and composer's debut and an acknowledged masterpiece of modern post-bop jazz. Featuring a sublime quartet with Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, Richard Davis on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums, the music still sounds as fresh today as it did the day it was recorded in November 1963, the start of an astounding creative streak that also produced Hill's great albums Smokestack, Judgment!, and Point of Departure during a period of just four months.