Schmann Archive
To Keep the Dark Away = Piano music of SCHULMAN, PROKOFIEV, WANGER, SHATIN – Gayle Martin – Ravello
In the course of documenting her friendship with composer Shatin, Gayle Martin drafts several Romantics. “To Keep the Dark Away” = SCHUMANN (arr. Liszt): Widmung; SHATIN: To Keep the Dark Away – Suite of 5 Pieces; Fantasy on St. Cecilia; PROKOFIEV: 5 Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75; WAGNER (arr. Liszt): Ballade of the Flying Dutchman; Isolde’s Liebestod – Gayle Martin, piano – Ravello RR 7937, 64:38 (7/8/16) [Distr. by Naxos] ***: Pianist Gayle Martin and composer Judith Shatin (b. 1949) have had a creative relationship as far back as 1997, when Ms. Martin performed Ms. Shatin’s Fantasy on Saint Cecilia at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. This disc features that work, along with Ms. Shatin’s piano suite To Keep the Dark Away Dr. Shatin teaches at the University of Virginia, where she heads the Center for Computer Music. Pianist Gayle Martin wishes to impart (rec. 10-11 September 2015 and 5 December 2015) her vision of luminous and numinous experience, and so she seeks out those composers and literary artists who exult in a “secret song” of “emotional fervor.” To be sure, Martin’s rendition of Schumann’s Widmung in the Liszt arrangement proves lyrical and dramatic in its “dedication” […]
BRAHMS: Sonata in f minor for 2 Pianos; Variations on a Theme by Haydn – Eleonora Spina & Michele Benignetti, pianos – Brilliant Classics
BRAHMS: Sonata in f minor for Two Pianos, Op. 34b; Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56b – Eleonora Spina & Michele Benignetti, pianos – Brilliant Classics 94956, 60:22 (7/31/15) [Distr. by Naxos] ****: Two of the Brahms orchestral works have their alternate egos realized in glowing terms on two pianos. This first disc in a projected complete series of Brahms’s duo-piano works, all to be recorded by the young Italian musicians Eleonora Spina and Michele Benignetti; this pairing of two-piano arrangements of larger scores derives from sessions 24-25 July 2014. Brahms in 1871 had already worked his 1864 Two-Piano Sonata from a string quintet, only to have had both Joachim and Clara Schumann declare that its form suited neither medium satisfactorily. The task of composing his first symphony lay ahead, and several of the motifs of the first movement would find heir way into that long-delayed work. But rather than destroy the Sonata, Brahms went forward with this publication, dedicating the score to Princess Anna of Hesse. Brahms would then settle for a hybrid of his former ideas, the Piano Quintet, Op. 34, as a fit medium for its weighty, symphonic conception. The opening Allegro non troppo gravitates […]
SCRIABIN: Complete Poemes – Garrick Ohlsson, piano – Hyperion
Garrick Ohlsson traces out, chronologically, Scriabin’s evolution as a “poet” in music, a journey darkly erotic and boldly illuminating.