Cheap Piano XX (Music) (Maurice Ravel, Leos Janacek, Alexander Nikolayevich Skryabin, Sergey Rachmaninov, Igor Stravinsky, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Karol Szymanowski, Massimiliano Damerini) Price
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| ARTIST: | Maurice Ravel, Leos Janacek, Alexander Nikolayevich Skryabin, Sergey Rachmaninov, Igor Stravinsky, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Karol Szymanowski, Massimiliano Damerini |
| CATEGORY: | Music |
| MANUFACTURER: | Arts Music |
| MEDIA: | Audio CD |
| TRACKS: | La Valse, Sonata I.X. 1905: I - Preduycha (Premotion; Die Ahnung; Pressentiment; Premonizione), Sonata I.X. 1905: II - Smrt (Death; Der Tod; La mort; La morte), Sonata No.9 In F major, Op.68: Black Mass; Schwarze Messe; Messe noire; Messa nera), Etude-Tableau In D Major, Andantino - Allegro - Allelgretto - Larghetto - Moderato - Lento - Vivo - Pesante, Two Waltzes In C, Three-Page Sonata, Metopes Op.29: I-L'Ile des sirenes, Metopes Op.29: II - Calypso, Metopes Op.29: III Nausicaa |
| UPC: | 600554721521 |
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Customer Reviews of Piano XX
Unexceptional performances hamper an otherwise good program This is the first of two discs in which contemporary music specialist Massimiliano Damerini makes a brief survey of the 20th century piano repertoire (hence the title Piano XX). This volume concentrates on the first third of the century, with music by Ravel, Janácek, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Ives and Szymanowski.
Ravel's La Valse is best known in the original version for orchestra, but the composer also arranged it for two pianos (memorably recorded by Martha Argerich and Nelson Friere) and for solo piano. It is the solo piano version we hear here, and it is remarkably faithful to the original's increasingly frantic, sinister dance. Damerini's performance is a little hesitant at first, but he gets very much into his stride as the work become increasingly virtuosic.
An equally dark work is Janácek's Piano Sonata 1.X.1905. The work was written in anger after the killing of a worker, Frantisek Pavlik, during a demonstration calling for the establishment of a university in Brno. It was originally in three movements, but the composer destroyed the third (and later the first two, though copies of them survived). An ominous Premonition begins the work, and the second movement is a bleak elegy entitled Death. Damerini's performance has some fine moments but lacks the coherence and consistent focus of Firkusny's recordings.
Scriabin's Ninth Sonata (misleadingly titled Black Mass, a soubriquet that the composer had nothing to do with) is a sustained, powerful crescendo of brief figures, trills and piled up fourth chords, growing inexorably in tension over somewhat under 10 minutes. Damerini's performance, while not erasing memories of the great Russian Scriabin interpreters, has the measure of the piece, holding back his pace for much of the work, allowing him to lunge into an apocalyptic climax.
The next three composers are represented by more minor works. Rachmaninov's D minor Etude-Tableau is probably the most famous of the set, and its pictorial inspiration comes out well in the music. Stravinsky's Les cinq doigts are a group of charmingly naïve miniatures for young pianists (evidently he thought quite highly of them, as forty years later he arranged them for a group of fifteen instruments). The two Gershwin waltzes are arrangements from the musical "Pardon My English", and are great fun.
Ives' Three-Page-Sonata is a three-movement piece in miniature, using the composer's typical arsenal of compositional tricks: popular music references, quotes from Beethoven's Fifth, brutal dissonances, collage-like textures and so on. Damerini's performance is unusually slow and not really competitive, though the slow central movement (played without the optional glockenspiel part) is quite effective.
Szymanowski's Métopes is probably the best-known of his large-scale piano works. This atmospheric, impressionistic triptych has attracted many fine pianists over the years, and those older rivals merely point up how Damerini's rather routine reading only catches fire in the more technically difficult sections.
As a collection, this is acceptable rather than exciting. Damerini's talents definitely lie most strongly in the area of new music, and this recording does not really play to his strengths, despite the attractive program. (To hear Damerini at his best, turn to his readings of Sciarrino, Lachenmann or Ferneyhough.)