Mark Viner - 24 Preludes 17 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Walk the mountains and the valleys, touch the lakes and rivers, smell the clean air and pine forest, see bleak winter wildness and spring flowers exploding, pause so you don't disturb the wildlife; watch, and be watched! Later inhale the faint smoke from distant warming fires and the food they cook. Embrace the day, and mould your thoughts and creativity. These are some of the life experiences had by Grieg, Rautavaara, Abrahamsen and Sibelius, who form the featured composers on this new recording.

The first joint album from countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and guitarist Thibaut Garcia, À sa guitare takes it's name from a song by the 20th century French composer Francis Poulenc. But it's frame of reference is extraordinarily wide - both culturally and stylistically. It's 22 tracks range across 400 years and music by composers and songwriters from France, Britain, Austria, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina and the USA. InchThe album is a journey between different cultures, different continents and different languages,Inch says Philippe Jaroussky, Inchbut each piece is a world in itself. The idea was to take some risks... sometimes moving to a completely different world between one track and the next.Inch InchWe can evoke hugely different colours as we juggle between renaissance music and a song by Barbara,Inch explains Thibaut Garcia. InchIt's our job to play with a palette of colours to produces something unique... We put a great deal of thought into the album, but we also put our hearts into it.Inch

Mark Viner's survey of the complete solo piano music of Alkan continues to turn up discoveries and reveal previously little-known or misunderstood sides of a protean figure in late French romanticism. Viner himself regards Alkan as 'the most enigmatic figure in the history of music as a whole'. The sixth volume of his survey focuses not on the grand cycles which have won this series such uniformly glowing reviews, but on sketches and miniatures which demonstrate Alkan's capacity to charm as well as astound and dazzle his listeners. All these pieces are further illuminated, as before, by his own comprehensive booklet notes. Several of them will be unfamiliar to all except the most dedicated of Alkan connoisseurs. Jean qui pleure et Jean qui rit is a pair of two 'chamber fugues' inspired by Voltaire's account of a man who goes, with great ease, from a state of depression in the morning to making merry in the evening. The Capriccio alla-soldatesca also has a poetic origin, as a paraphrase of an evocation of a night-watch - the subject of Rembrandt's most famous canvas - by Joseph Christian von Zedlitz. Le Tambour bat aux champs is it's companion piece, underpinned from the outset by a relentless ostinato of drum beats as a noble theme emerges, dignified and laconic. Better known, the Toccatina Op.75 can be counted among Alkan's finest shorter pieces for the piano, demanding phenomenal dexterity and lightness of touch. At the other end of the expressive scale, Désir is a little fantasy, one of Alkan's most homely-sounding miniatures, yet still coloured by his characteristic use of the ninth. Previous volumes in the series have demonstrated to listeners and critics that Mark Viner is the pre-eminent Alkan interpreter of our day. Jeremy Nicholas remarked in Gramophone 'It takes a certain kind of temperament and a superior finger technique to take him on. Those who cut the