Bohuslav Martinů - Piano Music Vol. 7 (Giorgio Koukl)

Information

Composer: Bohuslav Martinů

• (01) A Fairy-Tale of Goldilocks, H. 28
• (05) From Andersen's Fairy-Tales, H. 42
• (11) Ballade, the Last Chords of Chopin, H. 56
• (12) Merry Christmas 1941, H. 286bis
• (13) The Little Lullaby, H. 122bis
• (14) La Danse, H. 177
• (15) Le train hanté, H. 258
• (16) Prélude, H. 178
• (17) Foxtrot narozený na ružku, H. 123bis
• (18) Spring, H. 127ter
• (19) Children's Pieces, H. 221
• (23) Avec un doigt, H. 185

Giorgio Koukl, piano
Date: 2009
Label: Naxos
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.572025

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Review

The seventh volume of an invaluable survey of Martinu’s piano music

This – presumably – final instalment of Martinu’s solo piano music is once again a real mix of the juvenile and the mature, large-scale and miniatures of Webernian brevity. The quality is variable, too, perhaps more so than on previous volumes, but even where the inspiration ran thin – as in the pallid From Anderson’s Fairy-Tales – the music is neatly made and not unpleasant to hear. At its best (and first-rate Martinu˚ is not really on show) it is highly engaging; in the Foxtrot and Avec un doigt (the one finger belonging to a third hand, here provided by Giorgio Koukl’s wife), a hoot.

The disc opens with the largest items, two suites based on fairy-tales. Goldilocks (1910), however, has no connection with the familiar children’s stories but is an autobiographical, Elektra-inspired concoction based allegedly on a failed love interest. The programmatic details were left hazy by the composer (who dramatically marked the score “never to be performed”) as indeed in the Andersen pieces which overall are overlong and weak. The remaining works are vibrant small occasional pieces – like the brilliant Merry Christmas 1941 – or mini tone-poems such as Le train hanté, minor gems that add further to the human detail of this immensely human composer. There is delicacy here, too, as in The Little Lullaby, Jaro and the minuscule Children’s Pieces.

Koukl glides effortlessly through all the pieces (some of which sound decidedly tricky) and once again produces a programme of enjoyment and interest in equal measure. A splendid recording, too, made once more at Lugano Conservatoire in Switzerland, a model of balance for this music.

-- Guy Rickards, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2010/Feb10/Martinu7_8572025.htm

https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.572025&languageid=EN

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Bohuslav Martinů (December 8, 1890 – August 28, 1959) was a Czech composer of modern classical music. Martinů began as a violinist of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. In the early 1930s he found his main font for compositional style, the neo-classical as developed by Stravinsky. With this, he expanded to become a prolific composer, who wrote almost 400 pieces, included 6 symphonies, 15 operas, 14 ballet scores and a large body of orchestral, chamber, vocal and instrumental works. He is compared with Prokofiev and Bartók in his innovative incorporation of Central European ethnomusicology into his music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohuslav_Martin%C5%AF

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Giorgio Koukl (born 1953, Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a composer and pianist/harpsichordist. He studied with Rudolf Firkušný, Nikita Magaloff, Stanislav Neuhaus and Carlo Vidusso. Koukl is considered now as one of the major world specialists of Parisian music of the 1920s and of the "silver age" composers from Saint Petersburg. He has recorded the only existing complete set of solo piano music of Bohuslav Martinů for Naxos. He has also recorded the complete solo piano music of Alexander Tcherepnin, and several CDs dedicated to the music of Witold Lutoslawski, Alexandre Tansman, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Koukl
http://www.luxnova.com/~musicplay/koukl/

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