Peter Jablonski - Stevenson: Piano Works - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Pianist Peter Jablonski's second album on Ondine features a large selection of piano works by Alexey Stanchinsky (1888-1914), one of the most talented Russian composers of the early 20th Century. Stanchinsky was not only a talent but a genuine innovator who despite of his early death had a profound influence on the generation of composers to follow. Peter Jablonski is the perfect interpreter to these magnificent gems. Peter Jablonskiis an internationally acclaimed Swedish pianist. Discovered by Claudio Abbado and Vladimir Ashkenazy and signed by Decca at the age of 17, he went on to perform, collaborate, and record with over 150 of the world's leading orchestras and conductors, including the Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Mariinsky, La Scala Philharmonic, Tonhalle Zurich, Orchestre Nationale de France, NHK Tokyo, DSO Berlin, Warsaw Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Kurt Sanderling, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Riccardo Chailly, Daniele Gatti, and Myung-Whun Chung, to name a few. He has performed and recorded the complete piano concertos by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Bartók, and all piano sonatas by Prokofiev. Hailed as an 'unconventional virtuoso', during his three-decade-long career he developed a diverse and worked with composers Witold Lutoslawski and Arvo Pärt. Jablonski's extensive discography includes several award-winning recordings.

This album is pianist Peter Jablonski's third solo album for the Ondine tag. In this album Jablonski represents Grazyna Bacewicz's (1909-1969) dazzling piano etudes and piano sonatas which are hardly known outside of her native Poland. Jablonski's piano albums have received an enthusiastic response and his previous album received Editor's Choice from the Gramophone magazine. In recent years the music of Grazyna Bacewicz has been enjoying an ever-increasing popularity in concert hall programs. Bacewicz was a major Polish composer and a versatile musician a child prodigy violinist, she was also an accomplished pianist. As a composer, she is known for her inventive, complex, and original musical language, and particularly many of her works for violin are well known. Bacewicz studied first at the Warsaw Conservatory and briefly continued her studies in Paris before returning back home. In 1934, she received a position of concertmaster at the Polish Radio Orchestra. This position proved invaluable to her as a composer, giving her insights into each instrument's possibilities and orchestral composition. Her music displays many characteristic traits of the twentieth-century that are to be heard in the writings of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartók, and Lutoslawski, among others. Jablonski's piano album covers only eight short years during which the works presented here were composed and brings together, for the first time, both piano sonatas, and both sets of etudes. Sonata No. 1 for solo piano was composed in 1949but waited over seventy years until Peter Jablonski edited it for PWM for publication.

This new album from pianist Peter Jablonski and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra under Lukasz Borowicz, includes the world premiere recording of pianist-composer Andre Tchaikowsky's (1935-1982) 1st Piano Concerto and the first studio recording of the composer's 2nd Piano Concerto together with the Piano Sonata.