Giorgio Koukl, Virginia Rossetti – Rieti: Complete Piano Solo & Duo Works, Vol. 2 (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:16 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
Giorgio Koukl (born 1953, Prague, Czech Republic) with family roots going back to Belarusian noble family of Grigori Minaiev, is a composer, pianist and musical journalist who lives in Lugano, a town located in Ticino, an Italian-speaking canton of southern Switzerland.
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Giorgio Koukl, Virginia Rossetti – Rieti: Complete Piano Solo & Duo Works, Vol. 1 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:51 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
‘My music may not be performed often, but it is performed all over the world’, wrote the Italian-American composer Vittorio Rieti. His orchestral works were conducted and admired by luminaries such as Rafael KubelÃk, Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini but it was the piano that was arguably Rieti’s first and most significant musical love to which he brought a natural, effortless and brilliant style. The Second Avenue Waltzes for two pianos, one of his greatest works, is an expression of his maturity and full of charm, whereas the later Twelve Preludes for solo piano reveal a wealth of inventiveness. One of his most successful pieces, the Suite champêtre for two pianos, is fuelled by grace and elegance. Giorgio Koukl has been called ‘one of the five or six greatest living pianists today’ by The Art Music Lounge; he is joined in the works for piano duo by the prize-winning pianist Virginia Rossetti.
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Giorgio Koukl – Tansman: Piano Music (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:17 minutes | 1,03 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
Until shortly after the Second World War, Alexandre Tansman was one of the most played and most respected composers on the planet. Among his friends and colleagues during his time in Paris were Prokofiev, Stravinski and Ravel, then Einstein, Chaplin, Thomas Mann, and Gershwin once he settled in the United-States. However, Tansman was still able to forge his own personal style even in this melting pot of different cultures: music of devilish rhythmic and harmonic complexity but which was still light and easy on the ear. However, the post-war emergence of certain avant-garde styles sounded the death knell for this musician’s work, as for him freedom in no way meant anarchy, modernism and destroying the past.
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Giorgio Koukl – Szczerbiński: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 1 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:01 minutes | 1004 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
Polish composer Alfons Szczerbiński was born at a time of upheaval in Europe during the second half of the 19th century. A prominent Polish talent in the Romantic mould, Szczerbiński was profoundly influenced by the harmonic models of Bach, Haydn and Mozart. His surviving music is mostly written for the piano but many of his compositions were either lost during the First World War or destroyed by the composer himself. Heard here in their world première recordings, the Chansons sans paroles are Romantic miniatures that possess rich melodic elegance and marvellous phrasal beauty, sometimes redolent of Mendelssohn, Chopin or Liszt.
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Giorgio Koukl – Lutosławski: Complete Piano Music (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:41 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
Witold Lutosławski’s few surviving apprentice works are suffused with the elegance of Ravel and the lush effusiveness of Szymanowski, and this is particularly true of the early Piano Sonata, heard here in Giorgio Koukl’s new and corrected edition based on the original manuscript. Further premières include the wistful A Kiss of Roxanne and the technically complex Invention. Including all of the folk-music tinted pedagogical miniatures, works for piano four hands and other occasional pieces, this is the most comprehensive edition of Lutosławski’s works for solo piano ever recorded.
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Giorgio Koukl – Harsányi: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 3 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:53 minutes | 1,26 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
Tibor Harsányi, a student of Zoltán Kodály at the Budapest Conservatory, lived in France from 1923 where he became one of the leading expatriate composers to form the group known as “L’École de Paris”. As the 4 Morceaux show, his piano music is notable for its variety of character and genre. The Piano Sonata reveals his enthusiasm for dance rhythms and for joyful lyricism as well as quietly sombre elements, while the Burlesques flirt with jazz. The Piano Suite conjures up a vivid series of atmospheres in a work that is songlike, dissonant and ambient.
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Giorgio Koukl – Harsányi: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 2 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:16 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
The Hungarian-born composer Tibor Harsányi is now recognised as an important personality in “L’École de Paris”. He had a lifelong interest in modern dance, represented here by the Petite suite and Trois Pièces de danse, and he also embraced jazz, which was part of the Parisian atmosphere of the inter-war period, and other influences, while keeping the Central European rhythms and tonalities of his Hungarian origins. The Trois Pièces lyriques is a rare example of Harsányi expressing torment during the turbulent years of the Second World War.
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Giorgio Koukl – Harsányi: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 1 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:09 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
TIBOR HARSÁNYI is always associated with ‘L’École de Paris’, a loosely knit collection of expatriate composers living in the city, among them Martinů, Tansman and Tcherepnin. He embraced music from a wide variety of sources, notably from North and South America, and this enriched his own music’s rhythmic vitality and sense of colour.
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Giorgio Koukl – Szczerbiński: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 2 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 49:38 minutes | 810 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Grand Piano
Polish composer Alfons Szczerbinski was a Romantic who revered Bach, Haydn and Mozart above all others. Many of his scores were lost during the First World War or destroyed by the composer himself. His most extrovert music exudes the panache and rhythmic brio of Chopin whilst his series of Chansons sans paroles display a flair for harmonic fantasy and melodic beauty reminiscent of Mendelssohn. Giorgio Koukl’s second volume of Szczerbinski’s complete piano music reveals yet more discoveries by this unjustly neglected composer.
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