Search
0
Your Cart
0
Your Cart

Anthology of American Piano Music, Vol. 4

10,00 $ – 19,00 $

Cecile Licad

Called ‘a pianist’s pianist’ by The New Yorker, Cecile Licad’s artistry is a blend of daring musical instinct and superb training. Her playing displays a combination of qualities seldom found in the musical world of today: musical passion, artistic integrity, spontaneity, and a highly developed skill of amalgamating sometimes unusual, rarely-played compositions into extremely impressive recital programmes.
Born in Manila, she had her first piano lessons with her mother when she was three years old. At the age of seven she made her first public appearance, playing the solo part of a Beethoven concerto. When she was 12, she moved to the United States where her natural talent was honed at the Curtis Institute of Music by three of the greatest performer/pedagogues of our time: Rudolf Serkin, Seymour Lipkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. This was followed by five more years of private studies with Rudolf Serkin.
She made her professional debut at the age of 19 at the Tanglewood Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa. The following year she won the prestigious Leventritt Gold Medal, one of the youngest musicians ever to do so. Since then, Cecile Licad has been giving solo recitals all over the world and has appeared as soloist with numerous American, European, and Asian orchestras. She has performed with conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, André Previn, Mstislav Rostropovich, Sir George Solti, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Pinchas Zukerman. Among her most outstanding recordings are Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Claudio Abbado and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the second piano concertos of Chopin and Saint-Saëns with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under André Previn, a recording that was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque. In collaboration with the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg she recorded violin sonatas by Brahms and Franck, and in the last few years has become a frequent partner of cellist Alban Gerhardt, with whom she recently recorded the cello sonatas by Gabriel Fauré. Gerhardt said of her: ‘She belongs to those rare artists who deal with music in a way as it has never been dealt with before. The way how she performs Chopin’s Etudes is phenomenal – there is so much energy, passion, ecstatic power, genius…. I have always been waiting for someone to come and play these works in a way as she now plays them.’
Licad’s large repertoire as an orchestral soloist spans everything from the classical concertos of Mozart and Beethoven to the romantic literature of Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff, and on to the twentieth century with works by Ravel, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bartók, and Gershwin.
While her solo repertoire is even broader, she has recently developed a keen interest in classical piano music by American composers. Her 2003 Naxos release of solo works by Louis Moreau Gottschalk has rightfully been hailed as a landmark recording of music by this composer. In August 2010, it was Cecile Licad (playing Gottschalk) and Wynton Marsalis (with his 10-piece jazz ensemble) who provided the live accompaniment for the premieres in five American cities of the contemporary silent movie Louis, an homage to Louis Armstrong by director Dan Pritzker. Since then, Cecile has begun to include an increasing number of works by American composers in her recent recitals in major American cities (New York, Philadelphia, Portland, etc.) as well as in renowned music festivals (Miami and Husum, Germany). Her performances provided vivid testimony of her passion for these neglected American masterworks.

 

-Decrease product quantity. +Increase product quantity.
SKU: DACOCD 869 Categories: , , , ,

Review: MusicWebInternational

Review: PianoNews

George Gershwin
1. Rhapsody in Blue

2. Second Rhapsody

Concerto in F
3. Allegro
4. Adagio – Andante con moto
5. Allegro agitato

6. Variations on ‘I Got Rhythm’

Gershwin Trivia © Thomas Nickelsen
A local roller-skating champion and hyperactive kid of the Lower East Side who got into scrapes and fights, he assimilated the spirit of ragtime, blues, jazz (and operetta) as his successful but
restless family moved residence about every other year… to Brooklyn, Harlem, and back to Lower East Side. Listening to a school mate playing Dvorák’s Humoresque sparked his love of classical music. Taking piano lessons “made a good boy out of a bad one. I was a changed person six months after I took it up.” In 1913 he composed his first piano piece, Ragging the Traumerei, an irreverent homage to Schumann. After three years as a song plugger in a music publisher’s store he was engaged as rehearsal pianist in a Broadway show where some of his
tunes caught the interest of then-famous singers. In 1919 he landed his first hit, Swanee. Together with his brother Ira who soon became his preferred lyricist, he moved quickly up the
ladder in the theater world as one of Broadway’s most popular composers of musicals, some of which, like his biting political satire Let ‘Em Eat Cake (1933), would merit a revival in
our time (‘Tweedledee for President!’).

The constant output of musicals was interspersed with occasional “serious” works. Although Gershwin held popular music in high esteem – blues and jazz, the songs of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, the operettas by Victor Herbert, Lehár, and Kálmán – he equally adored classical music, particularly the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms, and Debussy. He admired many of his contemporary colleagues, went to visit Alban Berg in Vienna, played tennis with Arnold Schönberg in Beverly Hills, and consecutively asked Igor Stravinsky, Edgar Varèse, Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger, Jacques Ibert, and Alexander Glazunov to teach him composition. When all of them declined, albeit for different reasons, he took lessons in counterpoint,
orchestration, and conducting anyway, with less prominent but equally qualified teachers. Gershwin’s four compositions for piano and orchestra originated between 1924 and 1934. Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, and the Second Rhapsody were commissioned by Paul Whiteman, Walter Damrosch, and Serge Koussevitzky, respectively, while the Variations on ‘I Got Rhythm’ were composed for a concert tour commemorating the tenth anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue. As an accomplished pianist Gershwin premiered all these works himself.

Increasing fame and wealth enabled the formerly hyperactive boy to channel his surplus of physical energy into sports, including tennis, golf, skiing, wrestling, and swimming. He painted in water colors and in oil, and assembled an ever-growing art collection in his 14-room apartment. He loved fancy cars, horseraces, card games, fine apparel, manicured fingers, and the company of young, intelligent, attractive women. Friends describe him as boyish, ingenuous, amiable, polished in his manners, modestly egoistic, capable of great joy but also of recurring moodiness. The famous weekend parties at the Gershwin home were legendary and attracted a large group of friends – songwriters, actresses, composers, playwrights. According to many of the invitees
he had an “almost compulsive need” to play the piano at these gatherings. The guests would leap from their seats, flock around the piano to listen, and feel “oxygenated”. When the party was over “people…rushed away from Gershwin’s playing and painted or composed….It made one feel stimulated to go on working”; – in the feverish tempo of American life.

RELEASE DATE: MAY 2020

CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 869

EAN: 5709499869000

Download BOOKLET (PDF)

 

Product Type

CD, MP3, FLAC

Related products

Recently viewed products