Michael Boriskin - Piano Variations - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Michael Sch fer - Piano Works [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/27/2009

We have already introduced you to some of his symphonic music, chamber music, and songs, and a very positive review written in response to the first album will make you eager to hear more. Voilà The first album with piano works by Georg Schumann, who was the director of the Sing-Akademie in Berlin and a professor of composition at the Prussian Academy of the Arts! Today he is being discovered as a late Romanticist, but during his lifetime he was regarded as a Neoromanticist. Although Georg Schumann was not a descendant of Robert Schumann, he was from the same productive Saxon cultural landscape and from a highly musical family. Early in his life he developed into a brilliant pianist who already as a youth was able to perform challenging piano concertos. It is thus not surprising that the »master of the keys« also composed quality character pieces, impressive Inchatmospheric pictures,Inch and more works for the piano. This traces Schumann's path from his first piano compositions through to his more mature late works; in them we not only hear influences from Wagner, Liszt, and Chopin but also witness his gradual discovery of his own personal style.

Charles-Valentin Alkan is one of the most talented French romantic composers and pianists yet his music has rarely been recorded, and too little performed. Fascinated by the piano, Alkan showed great interest in the progress of instrumental manufacture and composed many works for solo piano; the programme chosen by Yury Favorin includes two of his major compositions. First, the Symphony for Solo Piano. With it's intense, deep, dense style, exploring and shaping the colorful timbres, it is indeed a symphony that Alkan has written for the piano and not a transcription for piano of an orchestral work. The Grand Sonata 'The Four Ages' is worthy of Beethoven's sonatas; this is a masterly work, one of the most accomplished sonatas of the romantic piano and herald of the Liszt Sonata In it's four movements Alkan describes four ages in a man's life 20 years old, 30, 40, and 50, explaining that these Inchcorrespond to a given moment of existence, to a particular disposition of thought, of the imagination.Inch