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Monthly Archive: May 2025

Stanley Cowell – Musa/Ancestral Streams – Mack Avenue

Stanley Cowell – Musa/Ancestral Streams – Mack Avenue

by | May 28, 2025 | Jazz CD Reviews

Stanley Cowell – Musa/Ancestral Streams – Strata-East/Mack Avenue #SES-19743-25 –  38:04 – ****1/2 (Stanley Cowell – piano, African thumb piano) As part of their re-release program of Strata-East Records albums from the 1970s, the Mack Avenue Music Group, is beginning with four prime albums from the label. One to get very excited about is Musa/Ancestral Streams, a solo piano issue from Stanley Cowell. Recorded in 1973, Cowell composed all the tracks, with gorgeous themes that blend jazz, classical, African, and Eastern influences. Stanley co-founded the Strata-East label, with trumpeter, Charles Tolliver (whose own Music Incorporated-Live at Slugs, Vol. 1& 2, is part of the initial re-issue series…). What made the Strata-East label so distinctive in its decade long tenure, was the fact that it was black artist owned, with the label roster free to record their own compositions, without regard to larger label interference, still a consideration in present time.  Stanley Cowell had a fifty plus year career, recording over 35 albums. He was raised in the Toledo, Ohio, area. He grew up with music in the family, and his parents ran a boarding house for traveling black musicians. Perhaps, the greatest jazz pianist of all-time, Art Tatum, was a […]

Agi Jamour Plays Bach – Toccatas and Fantasies – Forgotten Records

Agi Jamour Plays Bach – Toccatas and Fantasies – Forgotten Records

by | May 25, 2025 | Classical CD Reviews, Classical Reissue Reviews

J.S. BACH: Toccatas & Fantasias – Agi Jambor, piano – Forgotten Records FR 2361/2 (complete contents listed below; 2 CDs = 67:04; 71:55) [www.forgottenrecords.com] *****: Hungarian pianist Agi Jambor (1909-1997) led a remarkable life, of which her distinguished concert and pedagogical careers were only a part.  Her personal credo: “I do not play for success; I play to bring life to the composer” persisted throughout a life defined by music and a sense of the best of Austro-Hungarian culture. The daughter of a pianist mother who embraced her Jewish, humanist tradition, Jambor became a musical child prodigy, and she would study with such prominent teachers as Edwin Fischer, Zoltán Kodály and Alfred Cortot. They would infuse her music-making with a particular sensibility, which in turn made her into one of the most distinct interpreters of Bach, Mozart and Chopin of her generation. Jambor was a favorite soloist for Willem Mengelberg, Bruno Walter, and Eugene Ormandy.  With the emergence of Nazism and systematic, racial oppression, Jambor and her husband, the scientist Imre Patai and their child, embarked on a fantastical, grotesque pilgrimage to escape liquidation, under the auspices of “forged papers that identified her as a prostitute and Patai as her pimp. […]

Béla Síki – Beethoven Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 9, & 21 – Forgotten Records

Béla Síki – Beethoven Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 9, & 21 – Forgotten Records

by | May 12, 2025 | Classical CD Reviews, Classical Reissue Reviews

BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata No. 6 in F Major, Op. 10/2; Piano Sonata No. 9 in E Major, Op. 14/1; Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53 “Waldstein” – Béla Síki, piano – Forgotten Records FR 2366 (46:25) [www.forgottenrecords.com] *****:  Hungarian virtuoso Béla Síki (1923-2020) studied with Leo Weiner, Erno von Dohnányi, and Dinu Lipatti, winning the 1948 Geneva Competition. Síki earned world renown as a touring concert artist, and his recorded discography includes collaborations with many distinguished conductors, Sir Eugene Goossens among them. Having moved to the United States in 1965, Síki established himself at the University of Washington in Seattle, with a brief tenure at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, between 1980-1985. Síki returned to Seattle and the University of Washington to remain until his retirement in 2001. Pianist and former colleague Craig Sheppard provides a telling insight into Síki’s character: Wonderful friend, pedagogue and pianist. I first met Béla at the Leeds Competition in 1972, where he was on the jury. Although Béla retired just as I took up my post here at the University of Washington in 1993, we saw him and his wonderful wife, Yolande, socially from time to time. Several years […]

Maurizio and Daniele Pollini play Schubert – Deutsche Grammophon

Maurizio and Daniele Pollini play Schubert – Deutsche Grammophon

by | May 8, 2025 | Classical CD Reviews

SCHUBERT: 1Piano Sonata No. 16 in G Major, D. 894 “Fantasie”; 26 Moments musicaux, D. 780; Fantasie in F Minor for Piano, four hands, D. 940 – 1Maurizio Pollini. Piano/ 2Daniele Pollini, piano – DG 486 6398 (1025/24) (80:13) [Distr. by Universal] *****: We have Italian piano virtuoso Maurizio Pollini’s (1942-2024) last recording of June 2022, the swan-song music of Schubert played in collaboration with Pollini’s son, Daniele, in Munich, Germany. The pianism of Maurizio Pollini has consistently raised mixed reactions: his technique, considered flawless, became identified with a cool, hammered detachment that some auditors found austere and indicative of the “new emotional restraint.” Others saw Pollini as both an ardent Chopin specialist and a champion of modern, often highly intellectualized, scores that eschewed affective involvement and rather addressed philosophical curiosity, in the manner of enigmas and musical labyrinths.   The intrinsic warmth and personal serenity imbued in Schubert’s 1826 Sonata in G Major happily evokes from Pollini a corresponding geniality in spirit, the august opening of the first movement, Molto moderato e contabile, slowly evolving into a diaphanous trail of dancing and dramatic motives in loose sonata-form. Later, the initial theme modulates into a boldly unique, fff statement in […]

Guiomar Novaes Vol. 2 – Mozart: D Minor Piano Concerto; Falla: Night in the Garden of Spain – Yves St-Laurent

Guiomar Novaes Vol. 2 – Mozart: D Minor Piano Concerto; Falla: Night in the Garden of Spain – Yves St-Laurent

by | May 4, 2025 | Classical CD Reviews, Classical Reissue Reviews

Guiomar Novaes Vol. 2 = MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466; FALLA: Nights in the Garden of Spain – Guiomar Novaes, piano/ New York Philharmonic Orchestra/ Thomas Schippers – Yves St-Laurent YSL T-1665 (54:00) [www.78experience.com] ****: Those who cherish the artistry of Brazilian virtuoso Guiomar Novaes (1895-1979) continue to appreciate an intuitive, delicately sensitive musician – as said as a commemorative alternative of Artur Schnabel, a pianist – capable of color nuances and expressive details in the music she championed: the Romantics, especially Chopin and Schumann, and the Spanish and Brazilian composers sympathetic to her sensibilities. Even in her youth, at a jury recital in 1909, her audition to attend the Conservatoire de Paris to study with Isidor Philipp, Claude Debussy had nothing but praise for her natural gifts. Debussy later wrote of her, “She has all the qualities of a great artist, eyes that are transported by music, and the power of complete inner concentration, which is a characteristic so rare in artists.” Her exceptional playing inspired her nickname, “the Paderewski of the Pampas,” alluding to the sheer range of colors she drew in her fond realizations of music by Mozart and Chopin. Yves St-Laurent […]