Stravinsky: Danse Russe (from Pétrouchka) (Russian Dance)

“Pulcinella, The Nightingale, The Firebird and Petrushka take on fresher, lighter, more subtle colours and timbres, all exquisitely revealed in this masterly recording.” The Observer, 17th January 2010

“Athletic, sparky, rhythmically alert: nothing could be more invigorating than Stravinsky’s music for violin and piano...Anthony Marwood’s violin finds infinite subtleties in the music’s dance, while at the piano Thomas Adès is forceful without being domineering.” The Times, 30th January 2010 ****

“Marwood and Adès do the music every justice, bringing to their playing a sharp sense of rhythm and attack.” Sunday Times, 31st January 2010 ***

“This fabulous two-CD set offers so many pleasures it’s hard to know where to begin…the performances have a wonderful lived-in quality...[Ades] has exactly the right incisive, luminous and chaste sound. Marwood, too, has that springy balletic quality always needed in Stravinsky...In all, it’s a marvel.” The Telegraph, 5th February 2010 *****

“There are old friends. Three numbers from The Firebird, with a mesmeric Berceuse; the exhilarating Danse Russe from Petrushka stunningly delivered; and a reworked aria from the chamber opera Mavra. The only original work here is the Duo concertant, vintage neo-classical Stravinsky with styles ranging from coolly lyrical to busy. All these demands are superbly met by Marwood and Adès with immaculate rhythmic precision.” Gramophone Magazine, March 2010

“Adès's touch with the piano parts is at once live-wire and beautifully stylish, with Marwood matching this flair for deftly characterised light and shade. The Pulcinella suite and Divertimento from The Fairy's Kiss both scintillate from start to finish. The recorded sound, too, has marvellous presence.” BBC Music Magazine, March 2010 ****

“Marwood and Adès are a great fit: the intensely musical fiddle player at home in new concertos or classical chamber music, and Adès the uncompromising composer-pianist...The Duo concertant is a highlight; Marwood immaculately in tune whatever double stops, twists and turns Stravinsky throws at him, while Adès’s care with the separate strands of the piano part pay dividends” Andrew McGregor, bbc.co.uk, 25th March 2010

“Here is a fascinating programme of out-of-the-way Russian repertoire. …Lydia Mordkovitch's… is a passionate advocate for everything she plays, her accompanists are excellent, and no collector of Russian/Soviet music would want to miss the chance to encounter Volkonsky's Viola Sonata, or to thank her and Chandos for the opportunity.” Gramophone Magazine, September 2009

“Van Keulen and Mustonen are right on top of the Duo concertant’s frequently extravagant technical demands, and as in all the music here recorded they convey an infectious sense of enjoyment.” Gramophone Magazine

“The fruits of Stravinsky's rewarding partnership with violinist Samuel Dushkin are celebrated here. Van Keulen and Mustonen negotiate the music's awkward technical hurdles with cool precision.” BBC Music Magazine, July 2011 ****

“It's not just Ray Chen's superb technique, but his sense of pacing in the music that's so striking: there's always time for the music to unfold, even at speed...Both he and Timothy Young are right inside the music...in [the Wieniawski pieces] his musical and technical assurance find full expression. These are hugely exciting debut albums.” BBC Music Magazine, April 2011 *****

“Throughout this highly stimulating programme, Ray Chen (with just the right characterful timbre) and Timothy Young, whose glittering pianistic upper range catches the ear again and again, make a superb partnership, suggesting to the listener what Stravinsky and Dushkin must have sounded like nearly seven decades ago...An excellent, truthful recording balance, good notes and handsome packaging make this disc irresistable.” Gramophone Magazine, July 2011

“Chen and Young are capable instrumentalists and, in parts of [the Duo concertante], each displays an astute feeling for the angularity and rhythmic disjunction of Stravinsky's thematic material; it would be heard to imagine the Gigue (track 15) sounding more fleet of foot than here.” International Record Review, May 2011

“Self-respecting pianophiles will already have most of these seminal recordings. But, compared with earlier issues, APR reveal a fuller, richer piano sound where every nuance is crystal clear and in a judiciously-enhanced ambience…APR's presentation,as usual, leaves its peers standing, fully worthy of the great artist enshrined in these magical recordings” Classic CD

“Horowitz's 1930-36 European recordings are beyond price, and so it's more than gratifying to have them permanently enshrined on APR rather than fleetingly available elsewhere. This is notably true of Horowitz's legendary, forever spine-tingling 1932 recording of the Liszt Sonata. Here, once more, is that uniquely teasing and heroic sorcery with octaves and passagework that blaze and skitter with a manic force and projection; an open defiance of all known musical and pianistic convention. Horowitz's virtuosity, particularly in his early days, remains a phenomenon, and hearing, for example, the vivamente elaboration of the principal theme or the octave uproar preceding the glassy, retrospective coda is to be reminded of qualities above and beyond the explicable. His way with the Chopin Mazurkas unites their outer dance elements and interior poetry with a mercurial brilliance and idiosyncrasy, and who but Horowitz could use his transcendental pianism to conjure a commedia dell'arte vision of such wit and caprice in Debussy's Etude, Pour les arpègescomposés? Of the previously unpublished recordings, the first movement from Chopin's Second Sonata is as macabre and tricky as ever, with a steady, oddly menacing tempo. Prokofiev's Toccata, on the other hand, is tossed off at a nail-biting speed, and not even a small but irritating cut, a wild, approximate flailing at the end and an added chord by way of compensation, can qualify the impact of such wizardry. In Rachmaninov's G minor Prelude, however, Horowitz's volatility gets the better of him. If Horowitz, in common with virtually every other pianist, was not equally convincing in every composer and was even 'a master of distortion' for some, he was a Merlin figure of an indelible, necromantic brio for all others.
Though expertly transferred, they do show their age somewhat, but nothing can lessen the impact of Horowitz's early charisma.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Horowitz's tonal translucence and tireless caprice in his Chopin is beyond compare, and his Liszt Sonata remains among the greatest of all recorded performances.” Gramophone

“This colossal account of Liszt’s great, arching tone-poem for piano...has never really been surpassed for technical authority.” Sunday Times, 3rd January 2010