Review Corner

Category: Piano

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    Camden Reeves: Blue Sounds

    This is not a classical pianist’s take on the blues but a study on the colour, from its abstractness as an electromagnetic wave to blues as a scale, a genre and a harmonic structure. Blue is clearly an inspiring colour: artist Yves Klein famously went through a blue phase, selecting blue after audiences failed to…

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    Benedetto Boccuzzi: À Claude

    The Claude in question is Mr Debussy but if you’re expecting an album of Clair de Lune delicacy you’d be mistaken, as Boccuzzi’s album takes off from where Debussy leads, moving from the dreamy to the avante garde, the idea being to show the link between Debussy and composers old and new, including Boccuzzi himself.…

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    Zeynep Ucbasaran: 1847, Liszt in Istanbul

    This lively and more-ish album of piano music consists of a selection of works from the 1847 Istanbul recitals of Franz Liszt.Lizst had arrived to entertain and was given a seven-octave piano by craftsman Sébastien Pierre Erard to play on while he was in what was then Constantinople. He played at the Royal Palace, the…

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    Jill Crossland: JS Bach Keyboard Works

    This is one of those CDs we struggle to review: “Bach keyboard played well” is a little short, so we resorted to the biography and sleeve notes. The playing sounds difficult but Crossland is up to the task; for most of the CD the music flows around the listener like a fast river of notes,…

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    Mirian Conti: Tangorama, An Anthology of 20th Century Tango, Vol.1

    Conti writes in the sleeve notes that when she studied at the conservatory in Buenos Aires in the 1970s, she did not analyse a tango let alone play one; she herself dismissed tango orchestras and singers as “those old tango guys”. It was only when she moved to the US that she discovered her home…

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    Roderick Chadwick: La Mer Bleue

    This technical and slightly self-involved album revolves around Catalogue d’Oiseaux (“Catalogue of birds”), a work for piano solo by Olivier Messiaen. The full work is 13 pieces, devoted to birds and dedicated to his second wife Yvonne Lorio. The CD takes in the first three, the Alpine chough (chocard des Alpes), The Eurasian golden oriole…

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    Zeynep Ucbasaran and Sergio Gallo: Liszt to Milhaud, A journey With Piano Four hands

    This is one for those of you who like Last Night of the Proms, not to sing along to the traditional/jingoistic lyrics (delete as applicable) but because you like to turn the stereogram up loud and listen to cracking tunes to which you can hum along. The sleeve notes explain that before the invention of…

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    Murray McLachlan: Gregson: Complete Piano

    This is an appealing collection of piano pieces. It takes in different styles and sounds, and ranges from the intimate to the more extravagantly romantic, but it’s got a definite charm throughout. It gets off to a cheery start with An Album For My Friends, 11 pieces written for friends and showing a love of…

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    Pete Judge: Piano 2

    Kicking sand in the face of under-achievers everywhere is Pete Judge, a professional trumpet player with the jazz / rock quartet Get The Blessing, but who can play more than one instrument, in this case the piano; this is a collection of tunes he wrote for another band he’s in, Three Cane Whale. It’s a…

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    Murray McLachlan: Gregson: Complete Piano

    This is an appealing collection of piano pieces. It takes in different styles and sounds, and ranges from the intimate to the more extravagantly romantic, but it’s got a definite charm throughout. It gets off to a cheery start with An Album For My Friends, 11 pieces written for friends and showing a love of…