No keyboard lover should dare to miss this recording
mainFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
No label generates such a buzz around new releases as the quirky Munich-based ECM which, after 48 years of high output, still manages to produce the unexpected, and at high quality. To find the senescent music of C.P.E. Bach in a series that specialises in living composers is surprise enough. To hear him played on an esoteric Tangent piano is altogether a delight…
Read on here.
And here.
And here.
I dare say that no keyboard lover should dare not miss Marc-Andre Hamelin’s Morton Feldman disc. Another recent keyboard not to be missed is this.
https://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Piano-Sonatas-No-14/dp/B071GB8DJ1/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504286627&sr=8-1&keywords=evgeny+kissin
I found Lubimov’s playing passable, but it wasn’t really extraordinary. The only reason to purchase the disc is to hear the piano. If only it was played with better hands. It’s a curiosity that doesn’t really need to be heard for most.
I will buy this disc just for the cover design. That’s quality.
BTW, who needs yet another Appassionata?
Listen to it. Thank us later. The variations were Jaw Dropping.
Yes, sir!
The tangent piano is actually quite an interesting artifact – sort of like a harpsichord that is just reaching puberty and it’s voice is just starting to change into an adult fortepiano – although I have to say the examples I’ve heard sound a bit different from one another. I think my estimation of C.P.E. is a bit higher than anyone else here so far – the Concerto in E minor Wq 17 or the Four Symphonies Wqq 183 – especially the first one in D, which will get your blood going in a good performance.
Speaking of keyboards that never made it – there is the archicembalo, that microtonal instrument from the early baroque that provides four different tunings for each black key for those lovers of non-equal temperament in their chromatic music. It would, I guess, give anyone trying to play the Bach Chromatic Fantasy fingering nightmares. Each black key is divided into four little black keys one in front of the other. I would not want to be the piano tuner. I’d be their all day.
Then there is the PIano Lutheal device, which had a very short lifespan in the 1920s. It’s a real curiosity, even though there are only two pieces written for them. But, since they are both by Ravel, it’s worth listening to Tzigane and L’Enfant et les Sortileges played on the instrument they were composed for. Despite one may think of it, hearing Tzigane played on it will make you understand why he wrote the accompaniment the way he did. Sort of like a piano with a built in cimbalom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1jVtlN6ai0
We have an old harpsichord in Parochial House. Mrs Doyle found it one day, dusting the attic it was covered in auld dust and Father Jack’s empty Whiskey bottles and fag butts. After she and Father Dougal gave it a hose down, she noticed a label inside saying, this belonged to G F Handel Esq, Brook Street, London. Must have brought it over when he did Messiah! How it got to Craggy Island not even Bishop Brennan knows.