An arrestingly original record

An arrestingly original record

Album Of The Week

norman lebrecht

October 27, 2023

From 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.

Comments

  • A.L. says:

    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.

  • RW2013 says:

    Unfortunately so few pianists play the amazing music of Alkan.

    • Joel Kemelhor says:

      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.

  • Paul Wells says:

    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.

  • Mr. Ron says:

    Rameau and Ravel are “arrestingly original”? They both have a huge discography.

  • Jonathan Z says:

    My searches reveal that Ashkenazy has never recorded Miroirs as a pianist, only as a Conductor.

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