Nicolas Horvath - Complete Piano Works 3 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Alvin Lucier is one of America's foremost experimentalists, challenging the fundamental principles of music and focusing on acoustic phenomena and how listeners perceive them. Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators explores the acoustic 'beating' effects and tuning phenomena of sine waves against piano tones. This new XL version expands the extraordinary listening experience in a work described by Nicolas Horvath as 'immersive, intense and enigmatic'. Nicolas Horvath is an unusual artist with an unconventional résumé. He began his music studies at the Académie de Musique Prince Rainier III de Monaco, and at the age of 16, caught the attention of the American conductor Lawrence Foster who helped him to secure a three-year scholarship from the Princess Grace Foundation in order to further his studies. His mentors include a number of distinguished international pianists, including Bruno Leonardo Gelber, Gérard Frémy, Eric Heidsieck, Gabriel Tacchino, Nelson Delle-Vigne, Philippe Entremont, Oxana Yablonskaya and Liszt specialist Leslie Howard who helped to lay the foundations for Horvath's current recognition as a leading interpreter of Liszt's music. He is the holder of a number of awards, including First Prize of the Scriabin and the Luigi Nono International Competitions.

Germaine Tailleferre is best known for being the only female member of the French group of composers known as Les Six, and her stylish combination of neo-Classicism with a ready wit and energy can be compared to Poulenc and Milhaud. From the captivating Romance written while still a student, to her sparkling music for the 1937 Paris international exhibition, all of these pieces show Tailleferre as being very much at the heart of the contemporary French musical scene. This recording, described by the composer's granddaughter as being 'as though Tailleferre herself was performing these works', is the first of three volumes presenting the complete piano music played by Nicolas Horvath.

SOMM Recordings marks the 150th anniversary of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 - 1912) with a diverse selection of his orchestral works, reflecting both his Afro-British parentage and a musical milieu that included Holst and Vaughan Williams. Of particular note is that five of the seven works presented here are first recordings. This commemorative features the Ulster Orchestra conducted by Charles Peebles, whose first recordings of Piano Concertos by Dora Bright and Ruth Gipps for SOMM were widely praised. It was quickly apparent that Coleridge-Taylor possessed an unusual talent, and he produced a remarkable body of work before his untimely death at 37 though much of his music has been hidden from public view by the absence of surviving performance material. He composed his first work for voice and orchestra, Zara's Earrings, when he was just 19. Rebecca Murphy, hailed by Opera Journal for her Inchstunning delivery,Inch is the featured soprano. The Ballade, also written when Coleridge-Taylor was 19, was premiered by Isabella Donkersley, the future wife of Augustus Jaeger (soon to be immortalised by Elgar as 'Nimrod' in his Enigma Variations). The Ballade's great drama and charismatic melodic material play to the strengths of Coleridge-Taylor having been a violinist.  Ioana Petcu-Colan, heard here, is leader of the Ulster Orchestra and a soloist of considerable reputation. When Coleridge-Taylor heard Brahms's Clarinet Quintet while a student at the Royal College of Music, he was encouraged to write his own. The Romance for string orchestra is an arrangement of the quintet's introspective Larghetto affettuoso movement. Solemn Prelude, written for the Worcester Three Choirs Festival of 1899, is a work of elegiac pathos exuding the confidence of a young composer reaching the height of his powers. Since it's modern revival in 2021, it's been performed by some of the world'