Sunwook Kim - Last Three Sonatas - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Sunwook Kim came to international recognition when he won the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition in 2006, aged just 18, becoming the competition's youngest winner for 40 years as well as it's first Asian winner. He has appeared as a concert soloist with some of the world's leading orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and many more. On this , Sunwook Kim performs Beethoven's Waldstein and Hammerklavier piano sonatas. Beethoven's piano sonatas came to be seen as the first cycle of major piano pieces suited to concert hall performance.

(10% DISCOUNT THRU 8-24-12) Stompin' at the Bal de Maison evolved from Louisiana house parties where so many folks showed up to dance, the floor broke and they spent Sunday repairing it. This CD is that party, coming at you with relentless grooves designed to keep you stompin' in your own house or nearest dance hall with new originals, classic Cajun, hard core Zydeco, New Orleans R&B, French waltzes and blues ballads. Gator Beat not only covers the State of Louisiana, they infuse their own feel, call it Rock, call it Pop, call it Gator Beat Stompin' with 3 lead singers soul crooner Willard Blackwell, David Scott, giving it some rough and ready, and Susie Davis, singer/songwriter extraordinaire, adding her sometimes gutsy, sometimes sweet, but always rich and powerful. Horn section, fiddle, & button box, are added to the regular line up of drums, bass, guitar, accordion, sax, rubboard, piano, and penny whistle with carefully crafted harmonies.

Abstract instrumental works (that is to say, those which had no InchprogrammeInch in InchSocialist RealismInch.) were considered undesirable or - as in the case of chamber music - tainted by Western decadence. Shostakovich had won no friends within the cultural establishment with compositions of this nature. In two Pravda articles of 1936, Shostakovich was accused of Inchleft-deviantInch and Inchpetit-bourgeois decadentInch attitudes. By that time, he had already composed his Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in D minor op. 40; written in 1934, this work was premiered in Moscow the same year. It is essentially the commanding chamber work of Shostakovich's early years. In this recording, the sonata is heard in the version for viola and piano for which the viola part was arranged by Veit Hertenstein. Already seriously ill, he wrote his last work, the Sonata for Viola and Piano op. 147, one month before his death. It is regarded by many as his own encounter with Death. Shostakovich knew that he was about to die. Nor did he live to see his final work premiered.