Black Mass Archive

Presentiment: Orion Weiss = GRANADOS: Goyescas; JANACEK: In the Mists; SCRIABIN: “Black Mass” Piano Sonata  

by Audiophile Audition | May 2, 2018 | Classical CD Reviews

Orion Weiss initiates his own label with a recital ominous in its visions of the WW I apocalypse.  Presentiment: Orion Weiss = GRANADOS: Goyescas, Op. 11; JANACEK: In the Mists; SCRIABIN: Piano Sonata No. 9, Op. 68 “Black Mass” – Orion Weiss, piano –  Orion Weiss, 74:18 (3/2/18) ****:  Orion Weiss (b. 1981) has chosen three major piano compositions from the period 1911-1913, each anticipating the throes of WW I and its cataclysm for the world spirit. What Gustav Mahler would label the “Century of Death” had already begun to “flood the aesthetic of the old with anxiety, nostalgia, and confusion.”  Weiss describes this music as conveying “foreboding, tormented by premonitions of a horrific future.”  Performing on a Steinway CD 888 at SUNY Purchase (May 2014) as produced by David Frost, Weiss achieves alternately liquid and clarion tones that project love and death as two sides of a fateful coin. The 1911 six-movement piano suite Goyescas, Op. 11 of Enrique Granados takes its sensibility from the often Gothic paintings of Francisco Goya, “the last of the Old Masters and the first of the New.” The subtitle of the suite Los majos enamorados indicates that the subject will be love-affairs of […]