Elena Urioste

Elena Urioste, Tom Poster – Le Temps retrouvé (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:17 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

Elena Urioste and Tom Poster return for their second recital on Chandos, focussing on French repertoire. The performers write: ‘The three sonatas on this album were all published during the decade 1916 – 26, a musical period to which we often find ourselves drawn, when the world – and the artistic landscape – was changing beyond recognition. Faure lamented to his wife that his Second Sonata, composed under the shadow of the First World War, had never achieved anything like the popularity of his First; having fallen under the Second Sonata’s spell, we wanted to help to right this continuing imbalance. Mel Bonis, whose life story reads like the plot of a Hollywood film, wrote more than 300 pieces, and all those we have explored so far have been wonderful (she is our hot tip for the next composer due a major renaissance). Her only violin sonata is a rhapsodic work with a Greek folk melody at its heart, which we were enraptured by the moment we encountered it. Reynaldo Hahn is generally better known to singers than to instrumentalists, though his chamber music is as exquisite as his songs. His Violin Sonata was the last work on this album to be composed, but where Faure in his Sonata looks forward to modernist developments, Hahn (with the exception of his short middle movement, inspired by a fast car ride!) looks back nostalgically to a gentler time. The earliest of the works here, and possibly the most often heard these days, is the Nocturne by Lili Boulanger, an exquisite miniature from a composer whose life ended far too soon.’

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Elena Urioste, Tom Poster – From Brighton to Brooklyn (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:29 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

Elena Urioste is a musician, yogi, writer and entrepreneur, while Tom Poster is a musician whose skills and passions go far beyond the traditional role as a concert pianist. This CD is an exploration and tribute to their British or American background and also an expression of their mutual fascination for the music of each other’s homeland.
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Elena Urioste & Tom Poster – Estrellita (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:40 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

In their liner notes for this string of estrellitas (‘small stars’), Elena Urioste and Tom Poster admit to a shared love for ‘an old-world, golden sound and for melodies that tug at the heartstrings’. This has resulted in a deeply personal collection of miniatures full of winks, sighs and tears aimed at transporting the listener to bygone eras of fireside salon concerts. With a few exceptions, including Elgar’s Chanson de Nuit and Salut d’amour, the pieces are arrangements by the great violinists of that bygone, golden age: Auer, Kreisler, Zimbalist, Heifetz … while the originals they are based upon range from Gluck’s Melodie from Orpheus and Euridice and Liszt’s Consolation No. 3 to Beau soir by Debussy and Estrellita by Manuel Ponce. In a closing section Elena Urioste and Tom Poster also pay their respects to the Great American Songbook, with new arrangements, signed Tom Poster, of Moon River, When I Fall in Love and Over the Rainbow.

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