Various Artists - Una bella Serenata - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

On her fifth album, pianist and composer Beata Hlavenkova appears as singer for the first time. Her main musical partner on this album is Oskar Török who has contributed not only in his traditional role as trumpetist but also as drummer, percussionist and singer. The title SNE is a shortcut for everything that the album contains poems (baSNE), songs (píSNE) and dreams (SNEní). Beata has chosen poems by her favorite authors, Petr Borkovec and Bohuslav Reynek, and set them to music. Two of the sons are based on her own texts and two others musicalize lyrics by Dorota Barova and Martin Vedej. In foregrounding the song form on this album, Beata removes her music further away from the limits of jazz within which she used to operate and brings it forward in the direction of contemporary cross-genre songwriting. Her unique style, however, is still very much recognizable.

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

Various Artists - La Plus Belle Musique de Film [COMPACT DISCS] date 03/22/2012