Schubert: Fantasie in C major, D760 'Wanderer'

Praised by the Los Angeles Times for his grace, eloquence and the ‘understated beauty of his tone’, Macedonian pianist Simon Trpceski shot to fame after winning the London International Piano Competition in 2001. A regular concerto soloist with many of the world’s leading orchestras, he also enjoys a busy international career as a chamber musician, and his solo recordings have received recognition as ‘Editor’s Choice’ and ‘Debut Album’ awards from Gramophone.

With repertoire rich in nods towards a folk hinterland, Trpceski’s programme for this Wigmore Hall Live CD draws strongly on his deep immersion in national traditions of music and dance throughout his childhood. Schubert’s tuneful 16 German Dances pave the way to what is arguably the composer’s most virtuosic sonata, his ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy. Almost symphonic in scale, Trpceski’s emphatically energetic performance here unleashes an emotional outpouring.

By way of a transcription of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543, in which the rich sonorities of the organ work are handsomely explored in an arrangement for piano, the second half of the programme focuses on Liszt. Here, Trpceski demonstrates his wide palette of tone colours with subtly sculpted phrases to explore the depths of these masterpieces.

Paul Lewis is today regarded as one of the leading pianists of his generation. Having won the most coveted prizes of the great classical institutions for both his concert career and his recordings on harmonia mundi (Diapason d’Or of the year 2002, 25th Premio Internationale Accademia Musicale Chigiana di Siena, Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, and three Gramophone Awards including Recording of the Year in 2008), he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Southampton in 2009. He is also the first pianist in the history of the BBC Proms to have played the complete Beethoven concertos in a single season (2010).

He appears as a guest in the most prestigious concert halls and with the foremost orchestras and enjoys a privileged relationship with the Wigmore Hall, where he has performed more than 50 times. Early in 2011, Paul Lewis embarked on a two-year concert tour devoted to the works written by Schubert in the last six years of his life. When this is completed, he will have played in London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Melbourne, Rotterdam, Bologna, Florence and at the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Sviatoslav Richter is universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, renowned for his virtuoso technique and the depth of his interpretations. He was born in Zhitomir, Russia, in 1915 but grew up in Odessa. Unusually, he was largely self-taught, although his organist father provided him with a basic education in music. He started to work at the Odessa Conservatory where he accompanied the opera rehearsals. He gave his first recital in 1934 at the engineer club of Odessa but did not formally study piano until three years later, when he enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory. He studied with Heinrich Neuhaus who also taught Emil Gilels, and who claimed Richter to be ‘the genius pupil, for whom he had been waiting all his life’. In 1945 he won the USSR Music Competition and the Stalin Prize in 1949, which led to extensive concert tours in Russia, Eastern Europe and China, but he did not appear in the West until he performed in Finland in May 1960. Appearances in Chicago and New York followed later that year and he then gave concerts in Italy, Germany, France and Britain, confirming his reputation for having a mystic communication with the music he played, and a technique that seemed almost super-human. Richter disliked recording in the studio and some of his finest recordings originate from live performances at concerts.

The first CD begins with a live recording from the 1979 Tours Festival of Handel’s Keyboard Suite No.5 in E, whose finale is known as ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith. After this comes another live recording, this time it is a delightful short piece by Mozart – Andante and Allegretto in C for violin and piano, believed to be intended as movements of an unfinished sonata – in which Richter is joined by the Russian violinist Oleg Kagan, whose career was tragically cut short by cancer. Staying with Mozart, Richter next performs the opening movement of the Piano Concerto No.22 in E flat K482, followed by the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.17 in D minor known as ‘The Tempest’. This was the first recording that the Soviet authorities allowed Richter to make in the West. Next we hear two works by Schumann: the finale from Faschingsschwank aus Wien (‘Carnival Joke from Vienna’) and the whole of his Piano Concerto in A minor, which has been described as ‘one of the most brilliant jewels in the diadem of Romantic piano literature.’

CD 2 begins with another great masterwork for piano from the Romantic period: Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, which is followed by the delightful Theme and Variations from Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet, in which Richter is joined by the double bass player Georg Hörtnagel and members of the Borodin Quartet. Next we hear the romantic third movement of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto followed in complete contrast by the first movement of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.5. In 1940, while still a student, Richter had given the world premiere of the Sonata No. 6 by Sergei Prokofiev, a composer with whose works Richter was ever after associated. The programme ends with a complete performance of one of the most popular concertos in the entire piano repertoire: Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor.

"This is a performance of high quality. Sviatoslav Richter in particular precisely catches the cheerful mood of the music and the underlying shadows of which one should sometimes be conscious, and he plays those simple tunes in octaves so freshly that you’d think he’d only just discovered their charms." Gramophone Magazine

EMI MASTERS celebrates the full glory of the greatest performances from the world's greatest catalogue of recorded music. Digitally remastered at Abbey Road Studios direct from the original master tapes, these classic recordings emerge with unparalleled immediacy. You will be left in no doubt that you are in the presence of legendary musicians and ageless interpretations.

The artist writes “I feel the French word ”Voyageurs” best covers, in a single word, the many facets of the traveler…….. Making these various aspects of traveling in the broadest sense of the word, audible is the goal of my selection of these works.” Recorded live at the Vienna Musikverein.

Luiza Borac’s debut recording on Avie, of the Three Piano Suites by George Enescu (AV 0012/AV 0013), caused a sensation and garnered her unanimous critical acclaim, securing this young Romanian pianist’s place on the musical map. For her follow up recording, Luiza, who has won over two dozen international competitions including the Concours Grieg in Oslo, turns her attention to two pillars of the romantic era, Schubert and Liszt. The composers’ seemingly contrasting temperaments are linked on this CD by a common itinerant theme. Excerpts from Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage are paired with Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy (which Liszt orchestrated). Throughout Luiza applies strength and sensitivity in equal measure, beautifully and vividly brought out by the Hybrid SACD format.