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A little over ten years ago, the Swiss record label Claves set out to record Robert Schumann’s complete works for piano music. Rather unusually, the label has used not one, but three pianists for the recordings thus far: Finghin Collins (Vols 1 and 3), Francesco Piemontesi (Vol 4), and Cédric Pescia (Vols 2, 5 and now Vol 6). I hope Pescia will ...
The Stanford discography is steadily growing, yet when these performers gave the Second Piano Concerto its belated Proms première in 2008, the response suggested that the London critics still lived back in the dark age when Stanford was merely an Interesting Historical Figure, not a composer that one might seriously perform and listen to. Strang...
Programmes of Robert and Clara Schumann are becoming increasingly popular these days, and Nurit Stark and Cédric Pescia, Israeli and Swiss respectively, present an imaginative menu that focuses on the years 1851 (Robert) and 1853 (Clara). They launch into Robert’s Second Violin Sonata with great purpose and energy, its tumult well caught without...
Finghin Collins's first volume in Claves's complete cycle of Schumann's piano music (A/06) may be a hard act to follow but in Cédric Pescia, a young French-Swiss pianist, the label has chosen well. Vivacious, lucid and affectionate, all his performances are unfailingly musical. He plays Album for the Young without a hint of condescension but wit...
Enescu’s early string Octet (completed 1900) displays a dizzying mixture of qualities – exuberance, busyness, contrapuntal complexity, thematic richness and a sweep that suggests a burgeoning creative talent on a roll. I’m often reminded of the young Korngold save that the teenage Enescu’s more prolix style makes for longer musical sentences and...
Do you know Charles Villiers Stanford? If not, here is a wonderful opportunity to fill this gap: Irish pianist Finghin Collins (author of several Claves albums, among which volumes 1 and 3 of the Schumann collection) and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra co-sign with the Swiss label a magnificent recording completely dedicated to this…. Irish ...
The Swiss-French pianist Cédric Pescia adds two further discs to his previous volume in Claves’s series of Schumann’s complete piano works. And in Vol 5 he admirably blends the familiar and unfamiliar. Yet, if his energy and enthusiasm are almost palpable, there is too little sense of counterbalancing poise, of calm as well as disquiet. True, he...
Le pianiste lausannois complète avec virtuosité et naturel une intégrale collective du label Claves
Ce sont six volumes d’une intégrale qui a embarqué dans l’aventure plusieurs jeunes pianistes. Un puzzle musical éclaté a pris ainsi forme et il s’achève aujourd’hui avec une dernière pièce posée par un interprète, Cédric Pescia, qui fréquente dep...
Participant à une intégrale du piano de Schumann qui parvient aujourd’hui à son sixième volume, Cédric Pescia assemble ici, pour l’essentiel, des partitions peu courues. Cela suffirait à faire du double album un ajout parfait à toute discographie schumannienne, d’autant que les cycles d’Études sur les Caprices de Paganini y sont enlevés avec aut...
En décembre 2012, Esther Hoppe et Alasdair Beatson enregistraient pour Claves un disque étonnant où Mozart voisinait avec Stravinski. La couverture affichait crânement le compositeur du Sacre du printemps, masqué de ses fameuses lunettes noires, montrant un portrait de Mozart.
Cette filiation espérée – on sait que Stravinski n’envisageait à Moza...
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