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Gargoyles for Solo Piano, Op. 29 |
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"Stephen Hough's sensitive, superlative musicianship make his disc sixty-four minutes of pure musical delight. If you don't have the recording, beg, borrow or steal it today..."] Stephen Ch'in in La Scena Musicale "It's sad that so many of his thirty-something generation of pianists do not have a place for keyboard trifles in their repertoire. Sadder still that so few have the temperament and technique to bring them off. Hough is the exception, more so when he also plays the serious literature with such command and deep commitment. Here is a score of imaginatively chosen and nicely varied lighter pieces invested with the same flair, wit and style that he brought to Volume 1 (Moszkowski, Liadov, Ravina and Godowsky, for instance) many of which featured on the programme of the great pianists of the past. There are the odd pot-boilers with the soot scraped off (Rubenstein's Melody in F), four ferocious, contemporary Gargoyles by the American Lowell Liebermann and at least two genuine discoveries - Czerny's merrily twirling Variations brilliantes and Mischa Levitski's gorgeously scored poem The Enchanted Nymph....The recorded piano sound is as good as I've ever heard." (5 stars) Jeremy Nicholas in Classic CD |
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