Pascal Rogé

Both Pascal Rogé and Lorin Maazel were one of the mainstays of the Decca roster for several years, the former famed for the clarity of his vision in much French music, the latter recording vast tracts of repertoire with both, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra, in often white-hot performances. The Franck Symphony blazes away, with both conviction and sonic distinction. Its original LP coupling, the Variations symphoniques, receives its first international release on CD. And Bartók’s ‘Opus 1’, his Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, which, although a juvenile work, was performed by Bartók all the way through his piano-playing career. It was recorded by Rogé as a companion to his thrilling recordings of the Bartók concertos with Weller and the LPO.

Two pupils of the great Julius Katchen are featured in the piano music of Liszt on this 2CD set. Pascal Rogé was eighteen years old when he recorded the Liszt Piano Sonata, Mazeppa, Vallée d’Obermann and the third Liebestraum in London in December, 1969. It was during the 1967 International Competition Georges Enesco that Rogé was first discovered. He was sixteen, the only Frenchman to reach the finals, and he won a prize even though he was the youngest competitor. In Paris, where he was unanimously awarded First Prize for the Piano at the Conservatoire (in Lucette Descaves’s class) when he gave his first recital, Le Figaro wrote: ‘… Here is an exceptional personality and already much more than a hope: a gold mine’. The International Herald Tribune praised him with these words: ‘… his remarkable technical prowess, but also style and ability to draw his audience into his line of focus and hold it there. Such a quality is the sign of a true artist.’ Twelve years later, in 1980, he made another Liszt recording for Decca, this time of the Italian volume of Années de Pèlerinage. Both recordings are issued as part of this 2CD set, completed with Liszt recordings of both flamboyant pieces – the transcendental study Wilde Jagd, the second Legend ‘St. Francis of Paul walking on the waves’ – as well as the intimate, almost experimental late works. Born in Calcutta, India, of Viennese-Jewish parents, raised in considerable poverty, Jean-Rodolphe Kars was much admired in pianistic circles. Although his upbringing had been that of a secular Jew, he converted, in 1976, to Catholicism and was baptised in 1977. Mysteriously, in 1981, he put an end to his career as a pianist, entering the priesthood in 1986. All these recordings appear internationally on Decca CD for the first time.

For the final volume in his Debussy edition for ONYX, Pascal Roge is joined by his wife Ami in a collection of works for piano 4 hands and for 2 pianos.

Since the release of Volume 1 Preludes I & II in 2005, Roge’s recordings of Debussy have been received with critical acclaim. He is the quintessential interpreter for this repertoire.

Pascal Rogé has established a reputation as the world’s foremost interpreter of the French piano repertoire.

His recordings of the music of Erik Satie are unsurpassed after years in the catalogue, and his series for ONYX continues with a 4th volume featuring the 12 Études, among the composer’s masterpieces.

Gramophone said of Rogé’s recording of the Preludes: ‘this disc of the complete Debussy Preludes has all his improvisatory warmth and charm, qualities that can take you to the very heart of the composer’s evanescent world’.

Recorded live at The Granary, Beccles U.K., this recital captures Pascal Rogé in the repertoire that has earned him the reputation as one of the world’s greatest interpreters of Chopin and the French repertoire.

Pascal Rogé is today’s greatest ambassador and stylist in French piano music. Winner of two Gramophone Awards, his name is synonymous over many years with the finest in French piano playing, both in concert and on disc for Decca, and now in Debussy for ONYX

This well-filled 2CD set – nearly 2 hours and 40 minutes long – presents Bartók’s major concertos (the Viola Concerto appears on another Eloquence CD released this month). The three Piano Concertos appear in muscular and sumptuously recorded performances (one of the finest examples of Decca’s 1970s engineering at the venerated Kingsway Hall) by Pascal Rogé and Walter Weller. Likewise, the Second Violin Concerto resurrects a long-buried 1980 Argo recording by the late Iona Brown, with none other than Sir Simon Rattle conducting. The First Violin Concerto, the result of an ultimately called-off love affair with Stefi Geyer, found its music rechannelled into the Two Portraits and in Kyung Wha Chung and Chantal Juillet, respectively, find two of the composer’s most persuasive advocates.

“Iona Brown gives a clean-cut and stylish performance, superbly recorded” Penguin Guide