Scarlatti / Tempestad / Munoz - Venezia 1742 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Famed New York violinist Raoul Poliakin is highly regarded as a conductor of popular orchestral music. As a violinist, arranger, conductor, he has appeared on countless albums, including those of Frank Sinatra, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Wes Montgomery, to name a few. On these recordings spanning his works for the classic audiophile Everest tag between 1959 and 1960, Poliakin's imaginative reinterpretations of one of the greatest writers of American standard songs results in a unique listening experience. In addition to Poliakin's authoritative conducting, the striking attractiveness of these arrangements are underlined by the flawless quality of sound, made possible by techniques developed by master engineers working at the beginning of the stereo era. These recordings feature Poliakin conducting a 54-man orchestra and a 20-voice choir. All selections have been newly remastered.. All selections newly remastered.

The pianist Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) belonged to that tradition of German musicians - notably including conductors such as Furtwangler, Klemperer and Walter - for whom composition hardly less essential a component of their musical personalities than performing, even if it was an activity they largely undertook privately. Working day to day with imperishable masterworks by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, they did not expect to meet such standards, yet their own creative voices required an outlet through more than recreation of others. Left cold by the musical innovations and developments of their own time in the work of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, they wrote in a heightened Romantic idiom, and in genres - especially song and chamber music - which lay separately from their own professional activity as performers. Both chamber works presented here date from Kempff's youth. The Piano Trio was composed in 1911, when Kempff was 16, and bears a clear Brahmsian influence in thematic conduct and emotional landscape, through the guidance of Kempff's teacher Robert Kahn, who had himself been a student of Brahms. The Quartet is scored for the more unusual combination of flute, violin, cello and piano. It dates from 1920, and was composed on the island of Capri during a period of recuperation from a serious illness which had laid him low during a concert tour of Sweden. Thus the second movement is based on a Swedish folk theme and the finale ends with a whirlin Tarantella di Taormina, in the tradition exemplified by Mendelssohn's 'Italian' Symphony of German musicians letting Italian sunshine into their work. The Quartet is led by the flautist Ginevra Petrucci. Now based in the US, Petrucci has made several well-received recordings for Brilliant Classics, among them Romantic-era concertos by Briccialdi and a 'winning' (MusicWeb International) album of chamber music by the Polish-US i

In the light of his later music, it is by no means difficult to imagine Domenico Scarlatti strolling under the Moorish arcades of the Alcazar or listening at night in the streets of Seville to the intoxicating rhythms of castanets and the half oriental melodies of Andalusian chant. To them Saracen of his Sicilian ancestry and Neapolitan childhood must have responded. (Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti)