Tamara Gries - Woodworks - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The music of Michal Spisak was much more recognizable and available to a wide audience during the composer's lifetime than nowadays. This album contains three compositions of this artist the Piano Suite (a piece with a transparent texture in which Spisak clearly refers to the Baroque tradition), Sonata for violin and piano (for a change, very rich, diverse texture, full of violin dyad passages, varied in terms of harmony and sound color) and Concerto for two pianos (very spectacular work, extremely diverse, as far as the sound is concerned; highly demanding for the pianists). The aforementioned pieces are a cross-section of the compositional techniques typical of Michal Spisak's musical language; they also introduce a whole range of neoclassical features confirming the composer's stylistic affiliation. The music of Michal Spisak broadens the horizons of the musical imagination of both the performer and the recipient-listener, and this album attempts to show it's phenomenon, consisting in expressing naturalness and straightforwardness using an extremely wide range of various compositional techniques.

On Etudes & Frames, pianist Tamara Stefanovich presents the music of contemporary master Vassos Nicolaou. In his Etudes, Nicolaou uses virtuosity as a means to explore forms made of complex rhythms, great speed and multi-layered sound. Each of the fifteen etudes has an evocative title and focuses on specific geometrical-choreographical movements of the hands on the keyboard, as well as on a basic acoustical idea. For Stefanovich, this set has a structural integrity not seen since Ligeti's Etudes. Nicolaou's etudes are paired with Frames for two pianos, on which Stefanovich is joined by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Stefanovich studied together with Nicolaou and has been an important advocate of his music ever since. Dedicating an entire album to his music is a dream come true. Tamara Stefanovich is captivating audiences worldwide with a broad repertoire ranging from Bach to contemporary composers. Etudes & Frames is her third Pentatone album, after having released Influences (2019) and Visions (2022, together with Pierre-Laurent Aimard) with the tag.

Tamara Atschba - Violinsonaten [COMPACT DISCS] date 12/21/2012