A high-grade transfer to LP for Emanuele Delucchi’s scintillating survey of Stravinsky’s solo piano music, originally released in 2023.
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) became a pivotal figure in musical modernism with the works he wrote for Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, of which Le sacre du Printemps caused a scandal due to its fierce, brutal, and openly sensual character. The quintessential nature of Le sacre is pianistically conceived – those pounding chords and unpredictable accents that fit under the fingers – and Stravinsky no less than Beethoven is a composer who self-evidently both thinks and writes at the piano. Yet Stravinsky’s solo output for the instrument is relatively modest – surveyed here by Emanuele Delucchi within 50 minutes.
Even here, Delucchi finds space for a real rarity, an arrangement of a section from the Symphonies for Wind instruments which, in the ineluctable progression of its heavy and dense chords, once more reveals its keyboard roots in this transcription. For the rest, the original piano music focuses piece by piece on familiar tropes: neoclassicism in the Sonata and Serenade; popular and vernacular styles in the Piano-Rag Music and Tango.
Stravinsky used unconventional harmonies and rhythmic patterns, and often incorporated elements of folk music and jazz into his pieces. The Piano Sonata and Serenade in A can be described as neoclassical, blending traditional forms with a new tonal language. The Piano Rag Music, Tango, and Circus Polka are delightful examples of “light” entertainment music, spiced with syncopated rhythms and “wrong” notes.
Emanuele Delucchi is one of the most remarkable pianists of his generation. He has the technique and style to master the most difficult pieces with ease, logic and elegance. He made his name with his Godowsky series for Piano Classics, including the vertiginously difficult Chopin Studies. ‘Only top-flight virtuosos need apply,’ remarked Jeremy Nicholas in Gramophone: ‘Delucchi is one of them.
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