Tessa Uys

Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman – Beethoven Symphonies, Vol. 4 (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 22, 2023 · Comments off

SOMM Recordings is happy to present the fourth release in the planned First Recordings of the complete Beethoven Symphonies in the legendary edition for piano duet by Xaver Scharwenka, continuing a direct connection to Beethoven via his teacher Franz Kullak who studied with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny, played by the ‘wholly exceptional’ duo of Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman. This new CD couples Beethoven’s Symphonies 1 & 6 ‘Pastoral’ together with Busoni’s brilliant Concertino BV88 on a theme of Mozart K459, for Two Pianos.

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Tessa Uys & Ben Schoeman – Beethoven Symphonies, Vol. 1 (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 19, 2023 · Comments off

SOMM Recordings announces the launch of a major six-volume series of Franz Xaver Scharwenka’s transcriptions of Beethoven Symphonies featuring the label debut of the Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman Piano Duo. Formed in 2010, the Duo began their in-concert exploration of Scharwenka’s four-hand Beethoven transcriptions in 2015 and now bring that experience to disc for the first time. Volume 1 includes the premiere recording of Scharwenka’s piano duet transcription of Symphony No.3, the ever-popular Eroica, and Debussy’s two-piano arrangement of Robert Schumann’s Six Studies in Canonic Form.

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Tessa Uys, Ben Schoeman – Beethoven: Symphonies, Vol. 2 (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 6, 2023 · Comments off

Tessa Uys, Ben Schoeman - Beethoven: Symphonies, Vol. 2 (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz] Download

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the eagerly-awaited second volume of the Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman Piano Duo’s ground-breaking series exploring Franz Xaver Scharwenka’s transcriptions of Beethoven Symphonies. A composer of no mean stature in his own right, Scharwenka’s transcriptions were once widely admired, his treatments of Beethoven’s Symphonies a high-watermark of the genre.
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Tessa Uys – Beethoven Symphonies Vol. 3 (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 2, 2023 · Comments off

SOMM Recordings announces Volume 3 of the Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman Piano Duo’s ground-breaking series exploring Franz Xaver Scharwenka’s arrangements of Beethoven Symphonies. A composer of no mean stature in his own right, Scharwenka’s transcriptions were once widely admired, his treatments of Beethoven’s symphonies a high-watermark of the genre. Volume 1 (SOMMCD 0637) met with universal acclaim; Gramophone praising the “mastery” of the performances, BBC Music finding it “utterly beguiling”, and MusicWeb International declaring “I was blown away by this magnificent recording”. Of Volume 2 (SOMMCD 0650), Gramophone hailed it as “a thoroughly rewarding, often revelatory view of this over-played and overrecorded masterpiece [Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony]”. BBC Music Magazine said: “In terms both of precise co-ordination and engaging interplay, the performances are state-of-the-art”. Volume 3 couples perhaps the least known of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, No.2 in D major, and the extraordinary scale and innovation of No.7 in A major. As Robert Matthew-Walker points out in his informative booklet notes, perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Second Symphony, composed during a period of crippling self-doubt and encroaching deafness, is that it is “so positive and full of life, tingling with vitality and energy”. Of the Seventh Symphony, he writes, “Beethoven poses further challenges to his interpreters – technical as well as musical… Nothing like this had ever been expressed in music before.”

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