Dussek / Hakkila - Complete Piano Sonatas 4 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

This is the first volume of an extensive recording project using the combined resources of eight world-leading fortepianists. This will amount to the first comprehensive recording of Dussek's piano sonatas on period instruments. It will catalogue the brilliant, harmonically beautiful and expressive music of one of the most fascinating composers at the threshold of early Romanticism, one of Beethoven's most gifted and original contemporaries. In fact the parallels between Dussek and Beethoven are uncanny on this album, featuring three Op.10 sonatas and then Op.31 No.2 (though the 'Pastorale' subtitle corresponds with Beethoven's Op.28). The instrument used on this album is a 1798 fortepiano from the firm of Longman-Clementi. It dates from a decade after the Op.10 sonatas and only a few years after Op.31 No.2 from 1795. Accordingly the touch and sound corresponds more closely than any other piano previously used on recordings of this repertoire. Dussek lived in London during the 1790s, and worked closely with the manufacturer John Broadwood to extend the range of keyboard instruments. The English fortepiano lent itself naturally to the harmonic fullness of Dussek's preferred textures, and in reverse, the instrument's characteristic sound and touch inspired and shaped the development of Dussek's compositional style. Even more important than the instrument is the musician, naturally, and in Bart van Oort these sonatas find an interpreter with years of experience in performing music of this time and place. His complete survey of Mozart's keyboard music was praised in Gramophone for 'attractive intimacy' and 'sensitive, singing accounts'; his survey of early-Romantic nocturnes is distinguished by 'strong, authoritative artistry'. Album Tracks 1. Sonata in a Op. 10 No. 1, Craw 60 (1789) 2. Sonata in G minor Op. 10 No. 2, Craw 61 (1789) 3. Sonata in E Op. 10 No. 3

Brilliant's critically acclaimed Dussek sonata cycle continues with a pairing of early and late works. Viviana Sofronitsky, daughter of the great Russian pianist Vladimir Sofronitsky, followed in her father's footsteps by becoming a 'formidable pianist' (Fanfare). Early years in Russia were followed by a move to the United States to study early music at Oberlin Conservatory and further studies in fortepiano and harpsichord at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. An active performing career across Europe - from Leipzig and Utrecht to Oslo and London - included competition prizes at the Bach Tage Berlin and the Musica Antiqua competition in Bruges. Her discography includes solo music by Schubert and the complete piano concertos of Mozart, which drew praise for her 'superb articulation' in Fanfare. As on those earlier albums she plays a modern fortepiano by Paul McNulty, based on a Viennese model by Anton Walter, for these new recordings of sonatas by the Czech-born contemporary of Beethoven, Johann Ladislaus Dussek. The three sonatas gathered under Opus 9 are arrangements of works originally conceived for piano and violin most of the violin's melody line was originally doubled by the right-hand part of the piano, making the transformation from chamber to solo work seamless and straightforward, and the character of these late-18th-century works corresponds to similarly conceived violin sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven, where the spotlight falls on the keyboard. So it does in a quite different fashion in the penultimate piano sonata by Dussek, Op.75, which is cast in an early-Romantic vein. An expansive first movement is led by a gentle, exploratory opening melody which fractures and multiplies into passionate figuration across the entire range of the keyboard, and back again the journey from Beethoven to Schubert in a nutshell. This is followed by a stately, minuet-like

Wolfgang Brunner presents two opus numbers composed by Dussek in 1792 and 1800, around the time of the beginning and then the painful end of his marriage to the singer and harpist Sophia Corri. The comparatively early Op.18 No.2 shares the modest dimensions of Haydn's early keyboard sonatas, though by then Dussek was 32 years old and Haydn had already paid fulsome tribute to the younger man's 'remarkable talents'. Upon his marriage to Sophia he ran a moderately successful music publishing firm with his new father-in-law, Domenico Corri, but when the firm went bust late in 1799 Dussek abandoned Sophia and their daughter and fled to Hamburg; during the following year he wrote a trio of sonatas published in 1802 as Op.45. These are all more ambitious in scale and expressive reach. The slow movement of Op.45 No.1 bears the significant marking of Adagio patetico, and it explores reaches of grave feeling through harmonies in advance of their time. The two-movement Op.45 No.2 opens with a Larghetto sostenuto of grave concentration, though the mood is lifted by a gently circular, almost Schubertian Andantino. A lighter, more cheerful character pervades the D major Sonata Op.45 No.3, which concludes with one of the effervescent Rondos for which Dussek was celebrated in his own lifetime. On this recording Wolfgang Brunner plays a pair of instruments from Dussek's time an 1804 Broadwood, and a modern copy of a Viennese fortepiano originally made around 1810 by Michael Rosenberger. Once complete, the cycle will form the first-ever recording of Dussek's sonatas on historically appropriate instruments.