Christopher Hinterhuber - Sonatas & Rondos - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

As one of the greatest pianists in Europe of his time and a composer of exceptional ability, it is surprising that the name Ferdinand Ries is not better known today.

This record shouldn't, strictly speaking, be possible at all.It's not just that Autechre's music is electronic and Shane Parish's is acoustic. It's not just that Autechre come from electro and techno, while Shane's solo guitar music is rooted in jazz, folk, and the blues. Those borders, between mediums and genres, are as porous as you want them to be. But Autechre are synonymous with difficulty, opacity, inscrutability-known for unparseable rhythms, cryptic riffs, and shapeshifting timbres. Even on their early records, before they'd begun building out the mind-bending software systems that have defined the past quarter-century of their music, the duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown were working at the very limits of their machines eking melodies out of drum sounds, programming intricate polyrhythms of superhuman complexity, and writing sequences that defy attempts to decipher them. I've been listening to InchYulquenInch for 31 years, and I still couldn't tell you just what is happening between the melody and the beat; try as I might, I simply can't count out the steps.Now take Shane one guy, one guitar, two hands. Six strings. Ten fingers. (Throw in a tapping foot for when the timekeeping gets tricky.) That's the sum total of what he's working with. These are not the kinds of tools you'd think would be equipped for Autechre's music. But if anyone could take on a project like this, it's Shane. Informed by his years spent playing standards as a working musician in supper clubs and resorts around Asheville, North Carolina, he's been arranging music for solo fingerstyle guitar for decades-much of it material originally written for and recorded on other instruments. On his astonishing 2024 album Repertoire, he tackled songs by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Alice Coltrane, and even Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin, zeroing in on the essence of each and rendering it in

The eight piano concertos of Beethoven' friend and pupil Ferdinand Ries stand alongside those of Hummel as the most important works of their kind from the early 19th Century.