Hannes Minnaar - Goldberg Variations - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

J.S. Bach - Goldberg Variations [SUPER-AUDIO CD] Hybrid SACD date 06/30/2009

Nox, the Latin word for 'night'. In the world of art, the night of Schumann's Nachtstücke, Robert Zuidam's Nox and Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit creaks open it's doors like a haunted castle for romantic poets and composers. Night-time visions became the foundations of a pre-Freudian subconscious in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Some of the great writers discovered their dreams and anxieties, seeing themselves and the magic of imagination in the mirror of fantasy. It was no coincidence that their work provided intellectual sustenance for Robert Schumann, who also had a literary gift. His earliest works, which were entirely for piano up until his Nachtstücke, Op. 23, originated in psychological impressions gained from literature. Schumann wrote to his beloved, Clara Wieck, that the work stemmed from a premonition. During the composition, he kept seeing visions of funeral processions, InchCoffins and miserable, despairing peopleInch. His instincts had not deceived him on completing the work, with tears in his eyes, he heard that his brother Eduard was on his deathbed. Listening to the Nachtstücke again and knowing this, one can hear the shadows falling over light and life, depicted by the pianist's defeated irony. For Dutch composer Robert Zuidam, night is the night of toil. Nox is a night owl's ode to the hours of his creativity. Ravel had done everything he could in his piano cycles Jeux d'eau and Miroirs towards de-romanticising the 19th century character sketch, but he took an important step forward in Gaspard as regards both virtuosity and idiom. His aim was to produce something that was even more difficult to play than Balakirev's notorious Islamey. Gaspard is a deranged combination of abstract pianistic hyper-virtuosity with derailed eruptions of waltzes, peppered with raging, flamenco-style note repetitions and unplayable cascades of clusters of seconds,

After Bach's Goldberg Variations, which won him worldwide honors (including a Diapason d'Or), Hannes Minnaar challenges and confronts what has become a 'classic' of the 20th century repertoire Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues, composed in 1951. Here again, the qualities of his pianism, for which he is recognized as one of the leading musicians of our time, come under the spotlight the diversity of touch and the suppleness between tension and tranquility to characterize every Prelude and Fugue, the precision of tone, the lack of any affectation, a natural finesse in phrasing and articulation, and a familiarity with the score going hand in hand with a freshness that conjures a sense of improvisation. Here we encounter a new landmark in the crowded field of interpretations of this wonderful music.