Urszula Bartkiewicz - Polish Harpsichord Music 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Urszula Bartkiewicz - Polish Harpsichord Music [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/01/1995

Violinist Josh Modney presents this highlighting his remarkable versatility as a performer, collaborator, and improviser. The album is elegantly cohesive across the entire program, as concerns with alternate intonation systems, experimental approaches to timbre, and intensely collaborative work connect the pieces. Moreover, tying the collection together, from Braxton to Bach to Modney's own powerful improvisations, is Modney's focused virtuosity and a laserlike attention to sound and the details of the means for producing and shaping that sound. One hears this immediately in the first bars of the opening work by longtime Wet Ink Ensemble colleague, Sam Pluta. We hear not just a generic violin scraping sound along the string, instead we hear a whole vocabulary opening up inside this technique of sound production, a language Modney manipulates with as much subtlety of expression as we hear in his just-intoned performance of Bach's timeless Ciaconna. Josh Modney's improvisations demonstrate the sophisticated vocabulary he has developed for his work in this context. In his own words, InchThis way of working with material- allowing riorous investigations into sound to be the spark that illuminates a deeper path toward form, expression, emotion, language- represents an ethos that permeates all of the works on the album.Inch

'A Century of Polish Piano Miniatures' takes us on a fascinating journey through a golden era in Polish music, from the great patriot Paderewski via Szymanowski, Bacewicz and Gorecki, to present day composers. This essential collection coincides with Poland's centenary of independence in 2018 with each work representing significant moments in the country's musical and political history. It pays tribute to the bravery of composers who stood up for freedom in art and culture during times of great political turmoil. Anna Szalucka is a Polish pianist who studied at the Stanislaw Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdansk, the Universitat fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien, and the Royal Academy of Music in London under the supervision of Ian Fountain where she currently holds the Hodgson Piano Fellowship. She has performed many concerts throughout Europe, and has won esteemed prizes at several international competitions.