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Track(s) taken from CDA67967

Arabesque No 1 in G flat major 'Filigran', Op 5

composer
1900

Piers Lane (piano)
Studio Master FLAC & ALAC downloads available
CD-Quality:
Studio Master:
CD-Quality:
Studio Master:
Recording details: June 2012
Potton Hall, Dunwich, Suffolk, United Kingdom
Produced by Rachel Smith
Engineered by Ben Connellan
Release date: September 2013
Total duration: 2 minutes 57 seconds

Cover artwork: Portrait of Piers Lane. John Beard (b1943)
www.johnbeardart.com
 

Reviews

‘This superbly recorded disc (played on a gorgeously voiced Steinway) is Lane's love letter to the piano. I wish more pianists would share their guilty pleasures like this’ (Gramophone)

‘Lane in wonderful, debonair mode here, sparkling through a personal encore selection from Jamaican Rumba to a Toccata by his own father, and from Myra Hess to Dudley Moore’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘Puts smiles on our faces and tears in our eyes … Katharine Parker's Down Longford Way grows from an Ivor Novello-like charm into an opulently Romantic piece of striking contrast and colour, indeed the perfect choice with which to launch the disc. The playing throughout is first-class: witty where it needs to be, reflective and joyous elsewhere … Lane is a dynamic, insightful pianist who is able to bring a new perspective to the repertoire. His renditions of the Grainger and Bach / Hess pieces are quite beautiful, and in Mayerl's Marigold I can hardly imagine a more heartfelt account’ (International Record Review)

‘Piers Lane, one of the most versatile pianists around, presents many sides of himself in a selection of pieces that may seem topsy-turvy, incongruous even, but there are some wonderful and brilliant things here to be re-united with or discovered, and each piece is superbly played, with complete identification, and beautifully recorded too—just like a piano should sound, with all of Lane’s colours, dynamics and inflections faithfully relayed’ (Classical Source)
It was my second piano teacher (the first being my mother), Dr William Lovelock of harmony and counterpoint textbook fame, who introduced me to the music of Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877–1933) when I was twelve, through the Arabesque No 1 in G flat major ‘Filigran’, Op 5. Its gentle, elegant line and sympathetic pianism still touch me. It was written in 1900, an early work in an output primarily associated with the organ and, unusually, the harmonium, for which Karg-Elert remains the pre-eminent composer, with over a hundred works exploring its vast timbral resources. He was educated in the Leipzig Conservatory, where in 1919 he succeeded Max Reger as lecturer in theory and composition. Along with Reger, he ranks as one of the most important organ composers of the twentieth century. His own teachers included Carl Reinecke and Robert Teichmüller, but he was greatly encouraged by Edvard Grieg, whose music he hugely admired, along with that of Bach, Debussy, Scriabin and early Schoenberg. His thirty Caprices for flute were composed as exercises to keep a flautist friend occupied when he went off for active war service, but are still in use by young flute students everywhere.

from notes by Piers Lane © 2013

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