An arrestingly original record
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
The content of this DG debut album by the 2021 Chopin Competitition winner is arrestingly original. It features three French composers from the last three centuries – the court opera composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), the Jewish misanthrope Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-88) and the Basque bachelor Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) – never knowingly conjoined in the same programme….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
Oh, oh. You mean to tell us that the horizontal album photo take didn’t earn this release 5 stars, after all the “thought” put into the audience-building initiative? We shall soon be hearing from Pianophile.
Unfortunately so few pianists play the amazing music of Alkan.
You are right that Alkan was never programmed by many pianists, but he did have a vogue in the 1970’s, when recordings by Raymond Lewenthal were heard on college radio stations and reviewed in magazines.
The Columbia Records LP featuring Alkan’s “Funeral March for a Papagallo” has a cover appropriate for both Halloween or Monty Python: A 19th century “photograph” of black-clad mourners (including Lewenthal) in a cemetery, bearing a bird cage with a dead parrot.
An earlier RCA LP by Lewenthal was claimed to be the first commercial recording of any of Alkan’s compositions.
So all the absurd fuss about an amusing photo was about a photo from the *inside* of the CD booklet? Wow, that’s a lot of wasted outrage.
Rameau and Ravel are “arrestingly original”? They both have a huge discography.
My searches reveal that Ashkenazy has never recorded Miroirs as a pianist, only as a Conductor.