Tomasz Kamieniak - Niemann: Piano Music, Vol. 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The Russian composer Alla Pavlova, now resident in the USA, has written a number of orchestral works, including five symphonies and the ballet Sulamith. The orchestration of her Fifth Symphony is lighter and simpler than that of the preceding four.

The artistic credo of the renowned Canadian organ duo (and husband and wife) Sylvie Poirier and Philip Crozier is manifested in their exclusive commitment to interpretations of original works, supplemented by commissions from composers who have done concerted work with the performance possibilities and compositional demands of four-hand and four-foot organ performance. The present organ CD offers two works by Albrechtsberger and Wesley from the first half of the nineteenth century and works by contemporary composers with whom the performers work closely.

The largest part of the output of the Hamburg-born composer and writer Walter Niemann (1876-1973), a student of both Humperdinck and Reinecke, is piano music an astonishing 1,000 or so pieces, divided into 189 opus numbers. Most of them are lyrical miniatures in a warm and approachable late-Romantic style, some evoking the music of the past. Occasionally, though, as in Hamburg, a recollection of scenes from his childhood, a degree of mild dissonance indicates his desire to stay true to his memories of growing up in a port city.