Alain Planès, Eugene Asti, Sophie Karthäuser & Stéphane Degout – Debussy: Harmonie du soir, mélodies & songs (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:05:47 minutes | 1,93 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
This fine album centred on Debussy, entitled, Harmonie du soir (it is now the fashion to give classical releases titles of their own) presents a bouquet of melodies mostly dedicated to the nocturnes of which Debussy was so fond. It has a romantic opening, with the Nocturnes by John Field, and then by Chopin and Fauré.
The programme is a delight for the ears , with a certain, rather precious, “je ne sais quoi” alongside the consummate articulation and diction offered by both Sophie Karthäuser and Stéphane Degout, two artists at the dazzling height of their maturity. The evocative, tender, liquid piano of both Alan Planès and Eugène Asti also provides an air of great expansiveness.
Alain Planès – Frédéric Chopin: Complete Nocturnes (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:54:08 minutes | 1,86 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
His Debussy and Chopin recordings for harmonia mundi already offer ample evidence that Alain Planès is highly adept at selecting a period instrument best suited for the repertoire. For this complete recording of the Chopin Nocturnes, he has chosen a superb 1836 Pleyel – dating from the same decade during which many of these masterpieces saw the light of day. With this instrument’s unique colour palette at his fingertips, our poet of the keyboard deftly recreates the delicate magic of these immortal pages in which the composer, fascinated by the art of bel canto, developed a new approach to making the piano sing.
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Alain Planès – Bartók: Piano Works (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:57 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
This collection of Béla Bartók’s piano music offers a generous program of some of the most influential keyboard works of the 20th century, expertly played by Alain Planès. Making a clean break from the lush and sentimental parlor music of the fin de siècle, Bartók introduced a drier, muscular style, incorporating lively folk rhythms from Eastern Europe, pungent dissonances, percussive sonorities, and novel techniques that made the piano sound exciting and vital in modern music. Planès plays with extraordinary vitality, so his performances here are exciting and invigorating, while at the same time observant of all of the subtleties and soft qualities that made Bartók’s music poetic and deeply expressive. This CD opens with one of Bartók’s most revolutionary works, Dance Suite, which put him on the map as a modernist and made him the leading Hungarian composer of his time. This is followed by the Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs and Four Old Songs, a block of pieces that shows the great variety of styles and melodic inflections in folk music that became his chief resources. Perhaps the most advanced work is the acerbic Piano Sonata, both in terms of its daring dissonances and formal mastery, typical of his most important music of the 1920s. The collection is rounded out by the Six Romanian Folk Dances, which are similar to the Hungarian pieces heard earlier, and the Fourteen Bagatelles, which encapsulate in miniature many of his innovations. Harmonia Mundi’s recording is top notch, with great clarity and presence without excessively close microphone placement.
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