Aldo Ceccato - CD

Saint-Saens complete piano concertos on a 2CD Eloquence set presents some truly rare recordings - Campanella's of the Fourth and Tagliaferro's of the Fifth. And while the second is oft-played, this set gives the listener an opportunity to discover the lesser known First and Third. Also included is the first release on CD of Wedding Cake, with Daniel Chorzempa, familiar to all as an organist, playing the piano.

Aldo Ceccato conducts the Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga in a brilliant score by the legendary conductor Victor de Sabata. His complete incidental music for Shakepeare’s Merchant of Venice is recorded here for the first time. It was first performed in Venice in 1934. Ceccato is an international conductor and has been a guest at Glyndebourne.

Recorded in 1971.

‘Stuart Burrows … steals the vocal honours. Impassioned and youthful in sound, he produces a lovely lyrical legato in true Italian style but with intelligence and impeccable taste: this is his first Italian opera recording … Beverly Sills, as Mary Stuart, is in a class of her own. It is her technical prowess as a singer which stays in the mind rather than her characterisation of the unhappy queen.’ Gramophone

Donizetti’s take on the last few days in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, was premiered in 1834, but under the title of Buondelmonte due to the censor having problems with the subject matter. Executing monarchs made many European governments very jittery in the first part of the 19th century, with the French Revolution still very fresh in the memory of most leaders. In the past 300 years Mary, Queen of Scots, and Charles I in Britain, Carl Gustav in Sweden, and Louis and Marie Antoinette in France had all been executed or murdered.

The libretto of Maria Stuarda is taken from a play by Schiller and adapted by Giuseppe Bardari. The action takes place in the Palace of Westminster and Fotheringay Castle in 1587. Maria (Mary) attempts to plead for a pardon from Elisabetta, her half sister. The two Queens meet, and in the course of the meeting, Maria is provoked to the extent that she can no longer contain her anger, and lashes out at Elisabetta. Her fate is sealed, and she prepares for death calmly, and prays for her friends before going to the scaffold. The original uncensored version was premiered with Maria Malibran in the title role in 1835. Strangely, the British premiere was given in 1966 in St Pancras Town Hall, and the US premiere took place two years earlier in New York.

John Ogdon was born on 27th January, 1937 in Mansfield Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire and died on 1st August, 1989 in London. His first serious study of the piano was at the Royal Manchester College of Music where his contemporaries were Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies; he also studied composition with Richard Hall, all of whom have music recorded in this collection. His prowess was noticed when he replaced an indisposed soloist in Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto in Liverpool and played almost at sight. At the age of 21 he made his London debut at the Proms in 1958 with Busoni’s Concerto (which he recorded in 1967).

In 1961 he was awarded the Liszt Prize in Budapest and the following year shared the coveted first prize at the Moscow Tchaikovsky competition with Vladimir Ashkenazy; this achievement launched his international career. His recordings from this time not only attest to his remarkable virtuosity and intense musicianship but also his determination to explore both rarer and modern repertoire and give them the performances that show them to their best advantage.

This collection therefore contains not merely the classics – concertos by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Schumann and Grieg and solos by Liszt and Chopin – but rarer concertos by Mendelssohn, Glazunov Bartók as well as the aforementioned Busoni. The major contribution to the catalogue of recorded music must be the solo piano works by the 20th century composers: Sir Michael Tippett, Alan Rawsthorne, Alun Hoddinott, Christopher Headington, David Blake, Robert Sherlaw Johnson and his teacher and colleagues from his days in Mancheser: Richard Hall and the previously mentioned Goehr, Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies as well as works by himself. One further work requires especial mention: Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia on DSCH, the composer’s tribute to Dmitri Shostakovich.

At over 85 minutes duration it has to be split across two CDs and the work together with Ogdon’s support of it yielded the highest praise.