This selection of 17 Charles Ives' songs are not done too badly here, nor are they the best on record. The faster-tempo songs such as Ann Street, Memories, and 1, 2, 3 are a bit limpid and underpowered in Graham's reading, and it sounds like pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard gets his fingers stuck in the keys here and there. But the softer, slower ...
Representing virtually all phases of György Ligeti's mercurial career, the keyboard works on this disc make a fitting résumé. While a number of the pieces here reflect his avant-garde innovations -- chiefly Continuum and Volumina -- others are more accessible and appealing. The Five Pieces for piano four hands (1942-1950) are stylistically similar ...
Pierre-Laurent Aimard was the first pianist to record Book One of Ligeti's preludes on an Erato release from the early '90s, which also included the first recording of the composer's Trio for horn, violin, and piano. The preludes were so dazzling and Aimard's playing was so dazzling that it was astonishing when the composer went on to write an ...
Deutsche Grammophon's budget-priced, four-CD collection of all the works by György Ligeti in its catalog has many things to commend it, beginning with the title. Clear or Cloudy is a profoundly astute description of the composer's career, encompassing both the great sound clouds of his micropolyphonic work of the 1960s, such as Atmosphčres, ...
Audiences recognize Pierre-Laurent Aimard for his expertise in twentieth century music, so it's no surprise to find him recording the music of Debussy. The composers he usually plays (e.g., Messiaen, Bartók, Ligeti) wrote more percussively for the piano than Debussy did, which perhaps explains why Aimard's Debussy isn't as smooth and soft as it ...
Pierre-Laurent Aimard earned a reputation as a pianist unafraid of new music, and he usually achieved high praise for his recordings of twentieth century music. In the early 2000s, however, he returned to older repertoire, with mixed results. This recording of Schumann's Études Symphoniques and Carnaval is one of his better efforts. The Symphonic ...
This compilation of performances by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, taken from a number of previously released recordings, demonstrates the breadth of her interests and talents in repertoire that ranges from the Baroque to the twenty-first century, with something from every period in between. Although Graham shows exquisite sensitivity to the variety ...
Nocturnal in character, intensely virtuosic, and nearly equal in duration, Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit (1908) and Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies (1980) make a fascinating pair for this 2005 release from Warner; their similarities and differences are striking and thought-provoking. Ravel's dazzling fantasies on the spectral prose poems by Aloysius ...
Three discs of Chamber Orchestra of Europe performances devoted to work with conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt may seem excessive until one considers that their long association goes a long way toward explaining why the orchestra has a 25th anniversary to celebrate in the first place. The youthful players of the COE were ideal partners for the ...
This is a two-disc collection of music, either recorded on France's Naďve label or acquired by that label, that arose in Vienna during the years on either side of 1900. It might be argued that the music of the Viennese fin de sičcle was all about extremes -- of length, of concision, of orchestration -- and that the best way to appreciate the ...
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