J. Sibelius - Piano Quintets - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

A Manitoba, Canada native and Eastman School double Doctorate holder (1), pianist Jeremy Samolesky's debut Centaur venture is a two-composer program of Chopin Etudes (3), Nocturnes (2) and the magnificent Fantasie in f, op. 49 coupled with the first of Prokofiev's three Wartime Sonatas, the fiendishly difficult the No. 6, op 82 (1940). As a concerto soloist, Mr. Samolesky performs regularly with orchestras throughout the U.S. and Canada in additional to his international concert appearances. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Piano at Auburn University in Alabama.

With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Fazil Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than twenty-five years, in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organized classical music world. Concerts with this artist are something different. They are more direct, more open, more exciting; in short, they go straight to the heart. On the album now being released by Solo Musica together with the casalQuartett InchBallads & QuintetsInch there are two works by Fazil Say in addition to the Piano Quintet in E flat major op. 44 by Schumann. The casalQuartett, which has won numerous awards, has developed itself a unique sound and style that sheds new light on the heyday of the string quartet. The 3 Ballads op. 12 for Piano Quintet were originally solo piano ballads, which were rearranged especially for this publication for piano quintet. The piano quintet InchThe Moving MansionInch breathes new life into stories of the past. The background is a spectacular tale about the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Sibelius often took time away from his larger scores to compose piano pieces intended for amateur performance. The collections of short pieces in this recording all originated in this way, and, although he was not instinctively a composer for the piano.