Ropartz / Mccallum - Guy Ropartz: Piano Music - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Although Alexandre Boely (1785-1858) is best remembered as an important Parisian organist-composer, his piano music is as good as unknown. Yet it is an important link between the Baroque and Classical worlds of eighteenth-century France and the emerging Romanticism of the nineteenth. This recording, on an Erard piano from 1853, highlights both it's Classical poise and it's Romantic charm. It reveals Boely as a forerunner of composers like Saint-Saens, whom he taught, as well as other piano pioneers such as Alkan, Chopin and Liszt, all of whom this prominent Parisian musician and teacher may well have known personally. Stephanie McCallum is Associate Professor in piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music of the University of Sydney, where she herself studied with Alexander Sverjensky and with the noted Liszt player, Gordon Watson. After advanced studies in England with the Alkan authority Ronald Smith, she made her Wigmore Hall debut in 1982. She has appeared extensively as a soloist in Australia, France and the United Kingdom. Her recording of the complete Alkan 'Recueils de chants' for Toccata Classics was received with universal praise. She followed them up with a Toccata Classics album of piano music by Guy Ropartz.

Roy Agnew (1891-1944) - one of few early-twentieth-century Australian composers to gain international success - wove many external influences into a warmly Romantic personal style of striking variety and wide appeal, and his compositions, largely for the piano, are startlingly virtuosic, harmonically daring and charmingly sentimental by turn. Beautifully written by a natural pianist for his own instrument, they often recall the virtuosic textures of Liszt and Skryabin and occasionally show flashes of the Impressionist colours of Debussy. This is the fifth album that Stephanie McCallum - Associate Professor in piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music - has recorded for Toccata Classics. The four earlier ones all focused on French composers Alkan, Boëly and Ropartz. Now she turns her considerable talents to rescue a forgotten composer from her native Australia.

Magic, miracles, ghosts, world leaders; these days it seems there is little left to believe in. Lies outweigh truth and even truth can be dangerous. Raising everyone's spirits Already Dead - the fourth album and the first for nine years from Willy Mason - explores honesty and deception, anonymity in the digital age, good intentions with unexpected consequences, freedom, colonialism, love, god, and purpose because, it's storyteller says, now is the time to restore some much-needed faith. InchAlready Dead is a spiritual state to aspire to; it is freedom from the trappings and inhibitions of one's ego, culture, and mythology.