Ignacy Jan Paderewski - Piano Sonata; Variations & Fugues (Jonathan Plowright)

Information

Composer: Ignacy Jan Paderewski

• (01-03) Piano Sonata in E flat minor, Op. 21
• (04-19) Variations & Fugue in A minor, Op. 11
• (20-41) Variations & Fugue in E flat minor, Op. 23

Jonathan Plowright, piano
Date: 2007
Label: Hyperion
http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA67562

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Review

Paderewski for posterity – and a pianist who relishes all the Romanticism

Jonathan Plowright shines a powerful light on Paderewski. Gone is the purveyor of salon trifles and charmers (his Minuet in G is ever present in “those you love” anthologies), his very public charisma as both pianist and politician replaced by serious ambitions as a composer. The Sonata is more than 34 minutes in length – the finale’s whirlwind progress interrupted with a fugal development – while both sets of Variations end with fugues clearly inspired by Brahms’s Handel Variations. And it is here in particular that you sense Paderewski’s wish to doff his hat to academe and to write music of a substance that would outlive his more transient celebrity as a performer. The ghosts of many composers haunt his turbulent and sometimes dour pages (Brahms, Liszt, Schumann and, in Var 5 from his Op 11 Variations, his compatriot Szymanowski’s early Op 3 Variations) suggesting his difficulty in finding a distinctive and original voice. Paderewski’s treatment of his material may have all the virtuoso intricacy expected from a master pianist, but the ideas (the principal octave theme from the Sonata’s first movement, for example) are rarely satisfying.

However, in Jonathan Plowright you have a pianist clearly in love with every bar of Paderewski’s romantic rhetoric and it would be hard to imagine playing of greater sympathy or a more intimidating visceral strength and cogency. A pianist who excels in music’s darker undercurrents and declamations, he clears every daunting hurdle with awe-inspiring ease, making a formidable case for one of music’s neglected byways. Finely presented and recorded, this is a valuable and surprising issue.

-- Bryce Morrison, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.classical-music.com/review/paderewski-1
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2007/Oct07/paderewski_CDA67562.htm
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_cd_review.php?id=4800
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/aug/17/classicalmusicandopera.shopping3

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Ignacy Jan Paderewski (18 November [O.S. 6 November] 1860 – 29 June 1941) was a Polish pianist and composer, politician, and spokesman for Polish independence. As a pianist, he was a favourite of concert audiences around the globe, and his musical fame opened access to diplomacy and the media. As a politician, he was the prime minister of Poland and also Poland's foreign minister in 1919, and represented Poland at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Despite his relentless touring schedule and political engagements, Paderewski left a legacy of over 70 orchestral, instrumental and vocal works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacy_Jan_Paderewski

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Jonathan Plowright (born 1959 in Yorkshire) is a British concert pianist. He studied with Alexander Kelly at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and with Julio Esteban at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Plowright performed worldwide as recitalist, appeared with leading orchestras and ensembles, made many commercial recordings and appeared on radio and TV broadcasts. He championed neglected music from Polish Romantic composers, Stojowski, Paderewski and Melcer, which he has recorded for Hyperion Records.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Plowright

http://www.jonathanplowright.com/

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