Leifs / Wilkinson / Goumundsdottier - Elegies - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

It sounds like being in a dreamland when Icelandic tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson sings folksongs from his homeland. For his first GENUIN album, the first-prize winner of the Greifswald International Singing Competition and Audience Award winner of the Leipzig Bach Competition has teamed up with the sought-after accompanist Alexander Schmalcz. Schmalcz congenially tunes into in Kristjánsson's nebulous landscapes when the singer juxtaposes the old melodies, sung a cappella, with Schubert's Romanticism. A different language, a different time-but the same feelings and human destinies! Full of deep earnestness, a fine sense of sound and artistic unanimity a moving duo!

Ferruccio Busoni's Elegies (1908) and An die Jugend (1909) are experimental pieces that explore new pathways in the composer's harmonic language and artistic evolution. Elegies is an aesthetic manifesto, a wish for a turning point in the composer's creative evolution, but also, more ambitiously, in all future music. An die Jugend is a collection of four pieces written in 1909 which share some stylistic features with Busoni's first Elegy, while showing even further experimentation on the composer's part. Carlo Grante is one of Italy's foremost concert pianists. He has performed in such major venues as the Vienna Musikverein, the Berlin Philharmonie's Chamber Music Hall, London's Wigmore Hall and Barbican Hall, Rome's Santa Cecilia Hall, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Dresden Semperoper, the Stuttgart Opera, Prague's Rudolfinum, as well as at Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center in the US. He has appeared as soloist with major orchestras including the Dresden Staatskapelle, London's Royal Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony, Orchestra of St. Cecilia, MDR Leipzig, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and Concertino Wien. Grante performs these works on a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano.

Singer Pur - Renaissance Am Rhein Motets / Lieder & Chansons [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/16/2010