More Maurizio Pollini today. This time a complete, recent recording of Brahm’s First Piano Concerto, accompanied by the Staatskapelle Dresden under the baton of Christian Thielemann.
A fine recording by a great pianist – though I favour the Emil Gilels recording and (perhaps predictably) the bootleg Carnegie Hall recording of Gould/Bernstein, this one holds up quite well in comparison.
The first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, by J. S. Bach.
As interpreted by pianist Maurizio Pollini.
Glenn Gould would no doubt have spat out his milk and arrowroot biscuits in distaste at being made to listen to this particular recording, but for those with a broader aesthetic taste there is much to admire here.
Piano Sonata no. 31 (Op. 110), first movement, by Ludwig van Beethoven:
This pure, incandescent live performance is by the inimitable Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, recorded in Stockholm in 1958.
“Danse Bohémienne” for solo piano by Claude Debussy, (1880).
“Le Tombeau de Couperin”, in the original arrangement for piano, performed by Angela Hewitt:
As always with Ravel, the clarity of the individual melodic lines and the ripe potential for orchestration is readily apparent. Though it may be that I am reverse-engineering a composition to justify my analysis, I do believe that there is something special in Ravel’s piano music that seems to contain the pure distilled essence of melody and musicality – that kernel of imagination that almost cries out for sketching out with the full tonal palate of the full orchestra.
But sometimes it is nice to enjoy the purity of the original, and Angela Hewitt does not disappoint in this CBC Music recording. There are some moments of real melting tenderness in this performance – indeed, the six movements of the suite were each individually dedicated to friends or relatives of Ravel who had died fighting in the First World War.
Semi-Partisan Politics 