Berg: Piano Sonata, Op. 1

“There’s intelligent method in this two-disc mega-recital...Disc two ingeniously pairs four works from Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage collections with descriptive pieces by Bartok, Marco Stroppa, Ravel and Messiaen, highlighting poetic, formal, textural and gestural similarities galore. Aimard’s readings are characterised by a clarity that allows detail and shape rightful pre-eminence.” Sunday Times, 16th October 2011

“Bombarded as we are by Liszt recordings in his anniversary year, this is refreshingly different. Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is also a skilled maker of programmes...Since large quantities of Liszt in one sitting can be indigestible, this is an excellent way into the B minor sonata and sections of Années de pèlerinage.” The Observer, 16th October 2011

“Aimard has long established himself as the thinking person’s pianist. His Liszt Project juxtaposes a selection of Liszt’s works with compositions by contemporaries and successors who were inspired by him...It’s a strong idea, sustained by the Frenchman’s fastidious pianism, but it comes across more as a lecture-recital than a satisfying listening experience.” Financial Times, 30th October 2011

“Aimard is a supremely intellectual pianist and his intense, rigorously thought-out playing illuminates the two programmes...Aimard's approach is purposefully cool in order to highlight the structural elements of the piece and while there's some exquisite hushed playing, the thunderous climaxes don't build with quite enough abandon.” Classic FM Magazine, February 2012 ****

“This impressive double album is surely one of the most intelligent recorded contributions to the Liszt Bicentenary of 2011...Nothing in Aimard's performances is done for mere effect: throughout, he projects Liszt with a solidity and refinement of invention. A superb achievement.” BBC Music Magazine, February 2012 *****

“In the main, the later the Liszt the more impressive Aimard is...he is ideally persuasive that no composer stayed younger in his desire to make something new...Aimard's reading of the B minor Sonata is distinguished - intellectually satisfying, as it should be, as the most intelligent and far-reaching of all post-Beethoven sonatas on a large scale.” Gramophone Magazine, December 2011

“The best is Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances — a pungent coda” The Times, 20th November 2010 ***

“Mozart's A minor Sonata comes through the Grimaud experience much the best. Her booklet interview gives an intriguing view of the composer...and her way of bringing out the music's dramatic, pre-Beethoven manner convinces strongly...In Liszt's Sonata she deploys her technical command with total fearlessness” BBC Music Magazine, January 2011 ***

“This richly varied selection of works...opens with probably the most powerful of Mozart's two minor-key sonatas and Grimaud's interpretation is suitably involved and full-blooded...Her ardour and romanticism are entirely suited to the Berg and Liszt Sonatas: the technical challenges are effortlessly overcome and the tonal architecture is clearly paramount.” International Record Review, December 2010

“The Liszt Piano Sonata...is given a powerful and fluent reading that gets to the heart of the piece...skip the Mozart, sample the Berg and revel in the outstanding performance of the Liszt and the delightful Bartok.” Classic FM Magazine, February 2011 ***

“George Tsontakis's Man of Sorrows is a six-movement mediation of nearly 40 minutes' duration on Christ's crucifixion. Brilliantly written for the keyboard and scintillatingly orchestrated, it reminded me of Messiaen's Turangalîla… The piece if superbly played and recorded, patently sincere and easily assimilable.” BBC Music Magazine, Proms 2007 ****

“It's something of a challenge to recast Berg's Op. 1 Piano Sonata as a work for string sextet. …this arrangement, made by the Artemis Quartet's violinist Heime Müller, works wonderfully well. …their performance of the Sextet from Strauss's Capriccio sounds equally sumptuous as does their atmospheric and highly charged account of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht.” BBC Music Magazine, May 2006 *****

“…in Verklärte Nacht… the Artemis Quartet are joined by two members of the Alban Berg Quartet: the viola player Thomas Kakuska has since died, and the disc is dedicated to him. It's a memorable performance, beginning icily but generating a fiery intensity as the work's successive episodes unfold. A similar urgency and eloquence are found in the sextet which Strauss wrote as the Prelude to his last opera, Capriccio. Heime Müller's sextet arrangement of Berg's Piano Sonata is also refreshing in its resourceful transformation of this hyper-romantic music from one homogeneous medium to another.” Gramophone Magazine, July 2006

“Uchida's distinctive musical personality and outstanding technique make her Schoenberg, Berg and Webern well worth hearing, however many other version of these works you have in your collection. She brings a marvellous spontaneity and sense of drama to the more overtly romantic compositions here – Berg's Sonata and Schoenberg's Op 11 Pieces. This certainly isn't one of those accounts of the Berg where you question the composer's wisdom in marking the first section for repeat. As for the Schoenberg, never has one been more aware of this music's closeness in time and spirit to the cataclysmic world of the monodrama Erwartung. Uchida's earlier recording of Op 11 was warmly praised, and this one is no less accomplished. Elsewhere, her relish for strongly juxtaposed contrast risks occasional over-emphasis, as in the third of the Op 19 pieces, and the virtues of more sharply articulated playing in this repertory are demonstrated on Peter Hill's admirable super-bargain-price Naxos disc. His account of Webern's Variations is exemplary in its clarity and feeling for line; yet Uchida manages to suggest deeper links with more romantic perspectives without in any way traducing the music's inherent radicalism.
Links with romanticism are even more explicit in the texture and thematic character of Schoenberg's Concerto, and this performance places the work firmly in the tradition of Liszt and Brahms. Not even Pierre Boulez can bring ideal lucidity to the occasionally lumpy orchestral writing, but the performance as a whole, with excellent sound, has an attractive sweep and directness of utterance.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010