Warren Stewart - Complete Works 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Like his near-contemporary Rachmaninov, who called him Inchthe greatest composer of our time,Inch Nikolay Medtner was a composer, pianist, and exile. His portfolio of works includes remarkable pieces for his own instrument, including 14 sonatas and several miniatures. Paul Stewart's interpretation reveals Medtner's deeply emotional work in the sonata genre with this first of a series of Medtner Piano Sonatas.

Pál Hermann, born in Budapest in 1902, was not only one of the leading cellists of his generation he was also an important composer, one of the major figures in Hungarian music in the generation after his teachers Bartók and Kodály. But since only two of his works were published before his early death, in 1944, at the hands of the Nazis, and many more of them were lost, he has not had the esteem that he deserves. This series will present all his surviving compositions, most of them in first recordings. The major work on this first album, Hermann's Cello Concerto of 1925 in a reconstruction by the Italian composer Fabio Conti (b. 1967), sits somewhere between Bartók and Korngold and bids fair to become a staple of the cello repertoire.

During his time in Italy and later in Leipzig, Charles Gounod was drawn by the balance of sonic beauty and proportion to be found in the music of Palestrina and J.S. Bach. He developed an innate desire for simple directness as can be heard in the excerpt from the Messe solennelle de Sainte Cecile and the Meditation sur le premier Prelude de J.S. Bach, now better known as Ave Maria. Gounod's talents for melody and mood painting are demonstrated in his Romances sans paroles, while his sense of wit can be heard in the famous Marche fune'bre d'une marionnette.