To judge from the piano-by-the-sea graphics, pianist Bruce Levingston's Prelude to Dawn looks like a crossover album, a recital with pretty performances of Romantic favorites. In a way, a crossover release is what it is; the notes link the music in a general way to the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic that was underway as the album appeared in 2021. Yet, Levingston marries this concept to something else entirely, a "thoughtful dialogue" among German composers "that has spanned four centuries." The name of contemporary ...
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To judge from the piano-by-the-sea graphics, pianist Bruce Levingston's Prelude to Dawn looks like a crossover album, a recital with pretty performances of Romantic favorites. In a way, a crossover release is what it is; the notes link the music in a general way to the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic that was underway as the album appeared in 2021. Yet, Levingston marries this concept to something else entirely, a "thoughtful dialogue" among German composers "that has spanned four centuries." The name of contemporary composer Wolfgang Rihm is not one that turns up often on crossover releases, and many listeners will want this album for the two pieces from Rihm's early Sechs Preludes, densely polyphonic works that do not approach Rihm's later modernist style but somehow make that style seem more accessible. The rest of the program is Bach and Brahms, played with an intense, even defiant quality that does seem to pertain to the moment in history. There are a couple of Busoni arrangements of Bach...
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