WAGNER: A Siegfried Idyll; Tristan und Isolde: Love Music (arr. Stokowski); Lohengrin: Prelude, Act I; Die Walkuere: Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music (arr. Stokowski) – NBC Symphony Orchestra/ Leopold Stokowski – Pristine Audio PASC 609, 69:07 [www.pristineclassical.com] ****: The music of Richard Wagner always held a special place for conductor Leopold Stokowski, who, in the first concert he led in Cincinnati, 1909, both A Siegrfried Idyll and Ride of the Valkyries graced his program. Here, Pristine and Andrew Rose resurrect a series of selected Wagner pieces derived from NBC Symphony broadcasts, 1942-1944. Curiously, the aforementioned A Siegfried Idyll, here from 6 December 1942, represents the only sound document of Stokowski in this piece, since he made no commercial recording in his long career in the studios. Wagner lived in exile in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1870, when on Christmas Day, he engaged a group of Zurich musicians to play on the steps of their Tribschen villa wake-up, birthday music for his wife Cosima. Originally scored for 13 instruments – later augmented to 35 at its publication in 1878 – the music utilized in intimate terms melodic tissue from the opera Siegfried, which Wagner struggled to complete as the […]
BRAHMS: Rhapsody No. 1 in B Minor, Op. 79, No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 2 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 2; BARTOK: Rhapsody, Op. 1; LISZT: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 11 in A Minor – Alexandre Kantorow, piano – BIS SACD 2380, 66:28 99/4/20) ****: Alexandre Kantorow (b. 1997) stands as the first French pianist to win the gold medal at the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition as well as the Grand Prix in 2019. The present recital, culled from sessions in Paris and Finland (September 2019 and January 2020), displays a talent some have called “the young tsar of the French piano,” “the Musical Revelation of the Year,” and others have more skeptically deemed “a set of fast, skeletal fingers adept at the kind of finger memory adept at winning piano competitions.” Kantorow opens with the 1879 Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79, No. 1 of Brahms, the designation’s tending to belie its formal, modified, sonata-form structure. Brahms sets the piece in three sections, beginning Agitato, in the manner of the younger persona of the composer, whose sturm und drang capacities manifested themselves in the grand manner in his Piano Concerto in D Minor, Op. 15. The outer sections of the Rhapsody […]
