Messiaen - Oiseaux exotiques; Ravel & Schoenberg - Piano Concertos
£15.15
In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day
Despatch Information
This despatch estimate is based on information from both our own stock and the UK supplier's stock.
If ordering multiple items, we will aim to send everything together so the longest despatch estimate will apply to the complete order.
If you would rather receive certain items more quickly, please place them on a separate order.
If any unexpected delays occur, we will keep you informed of progress via email and not allow other items on the order to be held up.
If you would prefer to receive everything together regardless of any delay, please let us know via email.
Pre-orders will be despatched as close as possible to the release date.
Label: Pentatone
Cat No: PTC5186949
Format: Hybrid SACD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Orchestral
Release Date: 1st July 2022
Contents
Artists
Francesco Piemontesi (piano)Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Conductor
Jonathan NottWorks
Oiseaux exotiquesPiano Concerto in G major
Piano Concerto, op.42
Artists
Francesco Piemontesi (piano)Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Conductor
Jonathan NottAbout
Sound/Video
Paused
-
1Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major: 1. Allegramente
-
2Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major: 2. Adagio assai
-
3Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major: 3. Presto
-
4Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques
-
5Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, op.42: 1. Andante
-
6Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, op.42: 2. Molto allegro
-
7Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, op.42: 3. Adagio
-
8Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, op.42: 4. Giocoso. Moderato
Europadisc Review
Ravel’s playful, jazz-infused G major Piano Concerto (1929-31, the composer’s penultimate work) and Schoenberg’s 12-tone Piano Concerto, op.42 (1942) – obliquely autobiographical, and dripping with gestures of late-Romanticism – are separated by Olivier Messiaen’s coruscatingly kaleidoscopic Oiseaux exotiques (1955-56), with its brilliant harnessing of birdsong to create a concentrated, coherent concerto in all but name which pushes keyboard virtuosity to wonderful musical extremes. Each of these works is splendidly pithy, the Ravel in the ‘standard’ three movements, Schoenberg in four discrete sections that run continuously, Messiaen in a stunningly colourful single-movement span of 15 minutes. Presented side-by-side like this, they strike the listener as ideally complementary works, and Piemontesi, Nott and the Geneva orchestra highlight the salient individuality of each in turn.
First to be recorded (in November 2020) was the Ravel: a performance that may lack the forensic level of interrogation that Boulez brought to the score in his Cleveland recording with Krystian Zimerman, but injected with real ebullience and a sound-picture that integrates the piano well within the orchestra to create a well-balanced partnership. In the first movement – part-Basque folk idiom, part jazz – the saxophone-like, vibrato-laden solo bassoon is a real ear-catcher, as are the magical textures conjured by harp, woodwind and piano in the chain of cadenzas during the recapitulation. Piemontesi is fabulously dexterous in the outer movements, with the quickfire Presto finale dispatched with an elan that doesn’t obscure its musicality. But it is the central Adagio, with its long, singing lines so evocative of Mozart and its subtle rhythmic interplay, that forms the heart of the performance – a movement regarded as problematic by some commentators, but which silences all criticism here.
Like the Ravel Concerto, the scoring of Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques is – aside from a formidable array of percussion – fairly compact. But the work’s particular demands mean that the piano – sometimes the only instrument playing for long stretches, at others equal partners with the orchestra, at others still a relatively backseat presence – needs to be well-focussed. And so it is here, in a recording from December 2020. Captured, like all these works, in vivid surround sound, this performance positively bursts with colour, and the dynamic range and variety of articulation and touch matches the geographic spread of the birdsongs embedded in the work, from North America to South Asia and the Himalayas. In his excellent booklet notes, Nigel Simeone stresses how Messiaen’s free approach to geography in this piece helps ‘to produce a coherent musical whole’. It’s a coherence that’s memorably captured by a group of performers completely on their mettle, sparklingly engaging from start to finish, the timbral differences between bird species wonderfully highlighted.
While both the preceding works have American connections, Schoenberg’s Concerto was actually composed in exile in Los Angeles, but it casts more than a glance back to the old world, not least in the first section, a stylised Viennese waltz. A sinister scherzo, plangent Adagio and sardonically biting finale all give the lie to the belief that twelve-tone music (of which this is a classic example) is incapable of genuine expressive engagement. This February 2021 recording is a marvellously persuasive account, soloist and orchestra working in tandem to bring out a Berg-like level of emotional investment. It sets the seal on another hugely rewarding disc, one in which each work illuminates and is in turn illuminated by the others. The highlight for many may well be the Messiaen, but it’s the programme as a whole and the commitment of all the performers that makes it all so engrossing.
Error on this page? Let us know here
Need more information on this product? Click here