William Wallace Vincent - Celtic Fantasies: Piano Music 2 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Although the word salon derives from a room in a domestic dwelling (In 1836, Robert Schumann referred to Salonmusik (a term he incidentally coined) as a 'combination of sentiment and piano passage'), it also came to refer to private gatherings of composers and well-to-do members of society congregated in order to appreciate musical performances of a shorter and more varied nature, as distinct from those of longer chamber works. By the 1830s, the musical salon emerged as a vehicle for virtuoso performers who encapsulated the romantic ideals of enhanced emotional subjectivity and greater artistic individuality, with the piano at the center of it all. The charming, off-the-cuff pieces that so delighted audiences up until relatively recently seem to have faded away with the last performers of the romantic tradition. This album serves to illuminate the brilliant music that many of these underrated yet highly talented 19th century composers gave us. '... played with a purity, profundity and sense of dramatic architecture that truly stops you in your tracks. Really, bravo.' (Gramophone, 'Editor's Choice' - VILSMAYR Partitas [FHR38])

In the first volume of this series (Naxos 8.571382), Matthew Schellhorn surveyed six decades of Herbert Howells' compositions for the piano. This second volume reprises the journey, tracing the composer's stylistic development from the charming poetic miniatures of his youth through to the resonant modal quirkiness of his later dances. The survey includes a centrally important work, the Sonatina of 1971, performed here in Schellhorn's own edition compiled from the manuscript sources, which includes variants not heard for half a century.

As an internationally admired opera composer, William Vincent Wallace was perfectly placed to provide brilliant fantasies and paraphrases from the operatic repertoire, refashioned for the domestic piano market. He did not neglect his own works—there is an especially lovely aria from his opera Lurline, as well as an extensive fantasia on themes from Maritana, perhaps his best-known work. His instinct for the perfect transformation also included such favourites as Verdi’s Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves and Donizetti’s Una furtiva lagrima. Rosemary Tuck’s playing of Wallace has been acclaimed for her “ideally deft and scintillatingly assured performances.” (Gramophone). The legendary scholar and conductor Richard Bonynge performs at the piano on two of the tracks.