Liszt: Harmonies du Soir

"This is immensely distinguished Liszt-playing . . . Freire seems utterly at one with the music, not only in terms of its innate poetry but also its astonishing diversity of texture and touch . . . But the special quality of Freire's playing is really that he seems to put you directly in contact with Liszt himself, without the performer's technique or personality standing in the way, which is very rare . . . Altogether an immaculate disc, enhanced by an excellently balanced recording." --BBC Music Magazine, July 2011

. . . for sheer pianistic accomplishment and musical finesse, Freire's Liszt recital is unlikely to be bettered during this anniversary year . . . a wonderful corrective to those who think of this composer's piano music as all flamboyant gestures and rhetoric. The overwhelming impact of this disc stems from the sheer beauty and elegance of Freire's playing, his crystalline tone and infinitely subtle range of touch and colour, which are combined with all the technique needed to cope with whatever challenges these pieces present him.

Even a blowsy work like the B minor Ballade remains wonderfully controlled here, while the third of the Hungarian Rhapsodies is treated as a study in colour and pacing. Finest of all is the piece that gives the disc its title, "Harmonies du Soir" . . . it's sumptuous in its tonal palette, and ravishing in its delicacy and refinement. --Record Review /Andrew Clements,The Guardian (London) / 28. April 2011

Shostakovich, Liszt & Prokofiev: Piano Concertos No. 1

“With this scintillating and eagerly awaiting recording, 19-year-old Lise de la Salle makes her concerto debut on disc.…performances are of the highest quality.” --Gramophone Magazine. Disc of the Month - April 2008

“Everything about De la Salle's playing is astonishingly mature; technical challenges are met and never highlighted and she is always intent on seeking out the poetry beneath the teeming surfaces. This is distinguished piano playing.” --The Guardian

Expectations fully met in the glittering playing of a remarkable young pianist

With this scintillating and eagerly awaited recording, 19-year-old Lise de Ia Salle makes her concerto debut on disc. Once again her performances are of the highest quality, her rushes of adrenalin balanced by her precise calibration and control. Even with front-runners such as Argerich and Hamelin in the Shostakovich she holds her own, combining her freshness and ebullience with many personal and enchanting touches.

In the Liszt she is fearless in the face of every treacherous obstacle, but is also romantic and free-wheeling in the Quasi adiigio. The Allegro vivace is acutely focused rather than given with a weaker if more familiar balletic grace, and in the finale de La Salle's ultra-brilliance and vivacity are very much her own. Indeed, she makes you imagine Liszt's delight if he had been able to hear such youthful aplomb.

Again, de la Salle is off like the proverbial greyhound at Prokofiev's first poco phi mosso yet she also captures all of the central Andante assai's bittersweet, faux romanticism. By her own confession, and unconsciously echoing Arthur Rubinstein, de la Salle believes that artists should nourish their playing with outside interests, with life itself, if it is to do more than sound sterile or self-absorbed, and all her performances on this very special disc refreshingly confirm her philosophy. She is admirably recorded and partnered by Lawrence Foster, while trumpeter Gthor Boldoczki joins in her sense of fim and mischief in the Shostakovich. --Bryce Morrison, Gramophone [4/2008]

Tchaikovsky & Liszt: First Piano Concertos

“What makes these performances stand out is Ott's thoughtful approach to both concertos, eschewing empty display and bringing weight, detail and a range of colours to the solo parts. These bring their own rewards.” --Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2010

“Ott's muscular performance of the Tchaikovsky is tumultuous, relentless, inventive - utterly brilliant, in fact. And conductor Thomas Hengelbrock bolsters her view as he stokes the dramatic rhetoric and projects bold orchestral colours....Ott's youthful energy is a useful antidote to stodgy, old-school Tchaikovsky” --Classic FM Magazine, November 2010 *****

Alice Sara Ott follows up the complete Chopin Waltzes – her highly successful international debut – with her first concerto recording on Deutsche Grammophon. The young artist presents two of the greatest hits in the repertoire: Tchaikovsky’s and Liszt’s First Piano Concertos.

Alice Sara Ott recorded this partly live (Tchaikovsky) album in her home town of Munich with the superb Munich Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Thomas Hengelbrock, known as a modern interpreter with strong ideas (and a strong work ethic).

Alice says about the Tchaikovsky: “This piece is a revolution for me. It actually contains very different perspectives on life: the melancholy and gloomy, the majestic and, then again, the bright and light, lyrical and soaring. In any case it’s a challenge. A physical one, of course, but, in the end, really a mental one.” A challenge she has mastered, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung confirmed: “In the midst of Tchaikovsky’s avalanche of notes, Ott somehow manages to tease out the quiet passages, and with great poise to make room for lyricism and gently grazing the keys for a dreamy but distinct play of colours.”

The two concertos in this album are works that have accompanied Alice Sara Ott since her early youth. She played the Liszt before an audience the first time when she was 14 and the Tchaikovsky at 17. She has an intense relationship with both works, something clearly audible in the 21-year-old pianist’s vivid interpretations.

Sonatas & Etudes

“…22-year-old Yuja Wang is a wondrously gifted pianist whose debut album… suggests a combination of blazing technique and a rare instinct for poetry. In Scriabin's Second Sonata she is beautifully sensitive to the moods, whether tranquil and starlit or tempestuous, reflecting the composer's love of the Baltic Sea. She is fiery but never reckless in Chopin's Second Sonata... As a crowning touch her Ligeti Etudes are both musicianly and dazzlingly incisive. In the words of the publicist, "a star is born".” --Gramophone Magazine, August 2009

“The opening movement of Chopin’s Second Sonata certainly identifies qualities of youthful impetuosity, power and dexterity.” --The Telegraph, 25th June 2009 ***

“The Scriabin (sonata no 2) flows nicely; in the Liszt B minor sonata she’s no empty virtuoso. A talent worth watching.” --The Times, 23rd May 2009 ****

“…Yuja Wang… has all the equipment to be one of the most exciting pianists of her generation. As well as a stunning technique she has a fabulous range of sonority and colour… the two Ligeti Etudes, especially 'Fanfares', suit her dazzling fingerwork perfectly. Pianistically, parts of her Liszt Sonata are extraordinary, with blistering octaves, razor-sharp articulation and a wonderful tonal richness.” --BBC Music Magazine, July 2009 ****

Live at the Royal Albert Hall

“there's an admirable lightness of touch and appreciation of rhythmic flow to her "Für Elise", and her negotiation of Liszt's "Un Sospiro" is captivating.” --The Independent, July 2012 ****

“genuine gifts for lyricism and dazzling display...those musical gifts quickly hit the ears on this closely recorded CD.... Track three is Liszt’s La campanella, intelligently shaped, its bell sounds glittering as rarely before...Lisitsa tends to play with the lights fully on, with not enough shading in the wide expanse between loud and quiet. This gets rather tiring...But at the moment there is only one Valentina Lisitsa.” --The Times, July 2012

Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Valentina began playing the piano at the age of three and performed her first solo recital just one year later. She has won prestigious awards for her playing internationally, including the Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition (together with her husband Alexei Kuznetsoff).

Valentina Lisitsa has already performed at major international venues including Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall in New York and the Vienna Musikverein, and in countries as far apart as the Netherlands and Brazil. She has played with renowned orchestras including Chicago Symphony, Seattle Symphony, San Francisco Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony, collaborating with conductors Manfred Honeck, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, among others. Upcoming performances are confirmed with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Philharmonie im Gasteig, Munich with Münchner Symphoniker and recitals at the Victoria Hall in Geneva and Philharmonie in Berlin.

With more than 43 million views and over 52,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, the young pianist is not only one of the fastest-rising stars of the international concert scene but probably the single most-watched classical musician, having rapidly overtaken long-established giants of the piano world in terms of global online viewing figures.

Sonatas by Mozart, Liszt & Berg with Bartók's folk dances

“This richly varied selection of works...opens with probably the most powerful of Mozart's two minor-key sonatas and Grimaud's interpretation is suitably involved and full-blooded...Her ardour and romanticism are entirely suited to the Berg and Liszt Sonatas: the technical challenges are effortlessly overcome and the tonal architecture is clearly paramount.” --International Record Review, December 2010

“The Liszt Piano Sonata...is given a powerful and fluent reading that gets to the heart of the piece...skip the Mozart, sample the Berg and revel in the outstanding performance of the Liszt and the delightful Bartok.” --Classic FM Magazine, February 2011 ***

“The best is Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances — a pungent coda” --The Times, 20th November 2010 ***

“Mozart's A minor Sonata comes through the Grimaud experience much the best. Her booklet interview gives an intriguing view of the composer...and her way of bringing out the music's dramatic, pre-Beethoven manner convinces strongly...In Liszt's Sonata she deploys her technical command with total fearlessness” --BBC Music Magazine, January 2011 ***

Grieg & Liszt: Piano Concertos

'There are so many recordings of all three of these works that it's fair to ask: can we really be doing with any more? Yes, if they're in this kind of intriguing and appealing class … Hough's scintillating expertise is complemented by Andrew Litton and the orchestra's engaging and live-wire support … [Grieg] It's a credit both to them and to the music itself that it sounds so fresh here, while Hough finds new loveliness in it without ever descending into point-making. A pleasing and … thought-provoking release' --BBC Music Magazine

GRAMOPHONE CHOICE
THE SUNDAY TIMES CLASSICAL CD OF THE WEEK
INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW 'OUTSTANDING' AWARD
INTERNATIONAL PIANO CHOICE

'Stephen Hough continues to bemuse as a pianist so free from difficulty that he can soar, inflect and alter the course of a musical argument at the drop of a hat … He expresses a personality all his own, brilliantly alert to mercurial changes of mood and clearly riding on the crest of a wave of success. With technique honed to a state of diamond-like brilliance, he gives us rapier-like cadenzas and glissandos that flash like summer lightning' --Gramophone

'Time and again, Hough's traversals of familiar works are played with such insight, probity and sage musical understanding that we feel almost as if we are hearing them for the first time … [Grieg] Each phrase is shaped with the utmost refinement within an exquisitely fluid tempo that is perfectly matched by Litton and his musicians … This full-blown, go-for-broke, unapologetically Romantic approach yields one of the most intensely dynamic, emotionally authentic readings of this score we are likely to hear for some time … Stephen Hough's steady ascent to the summit of his profession exhibits equally supreme mastery of his instrument and the deep humanity from which it has flowered' --International Record Review

Liszt: The Complete Paganini Études

And still they come! Liszt Volume 48 is fundamentally about the Paganini Studies, and in particular features the impossibly difficult 1838 first versions of what became the Grandes Études de Paganini. Paganini's violin virtuosity was the primary catalyst for Liszt's quest to explore the limits of pianistic virtuosity, and these works, along with the 12 Transcendental Studies, are thus his definitive statements on piano technique.

“[Howard] can play anything that Liszt wrote, it seems, and be as intelligent and sensitive” --Classic CD

MP3 320 · 165 MB

Liszt: Les Préludes, Mazepa, Etc; Smetana

The revamped digital transfers enable Karajan’s irresistibly virtuosic performances of these Liszt tone poems (some, like Mazeppa . . . are by no means as familiar as they deserve to be) and other orchestral works . . . to register with an impact and brilliance unimaginable on the basis of the original LP releases. Les préludes, of course, was a longstanding Karajan staple; this stunning 1968 account is almost certainly definitive, and nor will you hear any finer versions of the [Rhapsody] included here. These are vintage Karajan offerings, and brightly lit, richly detailed remasterings . . . -- Michael Jameson, BBC Music Magazine [reviewing the Liszt recordings]

MP3 320 · 156 MB

Chopin & Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1

Gramophone Editor's Choice - May 2008

“The Liszt especially is scintillating. From the opening octaves Li seems to throw caution to the wind, which is really the only way to play this concerto, fusing electrifying spontaneity with meticulous control.” --BBC Music Magazine ****

“Mr. Li is a poetic player with a sensitive touch (but also ample power when he needs it), as well as an ear for textural clarity and an impeccable sense of line. Those qualities, notable on his handful of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, served the Chopin perfectly.” --New York Times

MP3 320 · 124 MB