Information
- Dora Pejačević - Blumenleben, Op. 19: No. 5, Rose
- Cécile Chaminade - Valse-Caprice, Op. 33
- Anna Bon - Keyboard Sonata in B flat major, Op. 2 No. 2
- Clara Schumann - 3 Romances, Op. 21: No. 1 in A minor
- Agathe Backer-Grøndahl - 3 Morceaux, Op. 15: No. 3, Humoresque in G minor
- Amy Beach - Hermit Thrush at Eve, Op. 92 No. 1
- Amy Beach - Scottish Legend, Op. 54 No. 1
- Emma Kodály - Valses viennoises
- Lili Boulanger - 3 Morceaux pour piano: No. 1, D'un vieux jardin
- Lili Boulanger - 3 Morceaux pour piano: No. 2, D'un jardin clair
- Lili Boulanger - 3 Morceaux pour piano: No. 3, Cortège
- Chiquinha Gonzaga - Cananéa, Valsa (arr. for piano, Anon.)
- Chiquinha Gonzaga - Água do Vintém
- Agathe Backer-Grøndahl - 3 Klaverstykker, Op. 35: No. 2, Albumblad
- Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska - Douce rêverie (Mazurka)
- Florence Price - Piano Sonata in E minor: II. Andante
- Tatiana Nikolayeva - Children's Album, Op. 19 (selection): No. 1, March
- Tatiana Nikolayeva - Children's Album, Op. 19 (selection): No. 2, Music Box
- Tatiana Nikolayeva - Children's Album, Op. 19 (selection): No. 3, Old Waltz
- Vítězslava Kaprálová - April Preludes, Op. 13: No. 2, Andante
- Miyake Haruna - 43 Degrees North, A Tango (2019 version for piano)
Hiroko Ishimoto, piano
Date: 2020
Label: Grand Piano
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In this collection of 21 brief works, there is no great music, a lot of good music and a few of which the worst that can be said is that they are derivative and lack an individual voice.
Such a one is the first item here, the charming ‘Rose’ from Blumenleben by the Hungarian-born Dora Pejačević (1885-1923), and the second, Chaminade’s no less attractive Valse-Caprice (c1885), reminiscent of her brother-in-law Moritz Moszkowski. After this agreeable salon froth, it is something of a jar to be thrust into the world of CPE Bach with the Sonata in B flat by the Italian Anna Bon (b c1739), so neglected that no one is exactly sure of the details of her life and death after her marriage in 1767, despite being chamber music virtuosa at the Prussian court of King Frederick the Great.
The pieces by the more famous Clara Schumann and Agathe Backer Grøndahl fail to make a strong impression; as, sadly, does a Mazurka by Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska, best known for her once-ubiquitous The Maiden’s Prayer; Amy Beach’s A Hermit Thrush at Eve (heard in a more atmospheric performance by Cecile Licad – Danacord, A/17) and Scottish Legend are sweet MacDowell-like tone poems. It is not until we reach the Valses viennoises of Emma Kodály (Zoltán’s composer wife) and Lili Boulanger’s ‘Cortège’ that we encounter two unequivocal gems, the latter surely the liveliest cortège in all music.
So it continues. Seek out the two pieces by the Brazilian Chiquinha Gonzaga (shades of Nazareth and Lecuona) or the touching, spiritual-like Andante of Florence Price’s E minor Sonata. The most recent work is from 2019 and is also the final track, a piano version of 43˚ North: A Tango by Haruna Miyake. You may get on better than I did with its overt but seemingly arbitrary fusion of tonal pastiche and atonal ‘deconstruction’ (according to the booklet).
Hiroko Ishimoto, playing a Steinway Model C, has been well recorded in a suitably intimate (but far from claustrophobic) acoustic with only the occasional pedal thump. I should like to have heard more variety in her tonal colouring – and she could surely have enjoyed herself more in the Gonzaga pieces – but on the whole these are worthy, well-executed performances on an album with a strong appeal to pianophile repertoire junkies.
-- Jeremy Nicholas, Gramophone
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Born in Sapporo, Japan, Hiroko Ishimoto studied at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo, where she went on to lecture, and The Juilliard School in New York where her professor was György Sándor, the great Hungarian-American pianist and leading pupil of Béla Bartók. Highly acclaimed by The New York Times and Japanese magazine The World of Music, Ishimoto also devotes time to her piano students, and currently resides in Budapest. Ishimoto has released two albums in Japan,while her series of essays and performances on YouTube of Women Composers in the Shadows of Men has garnered worldwide attention.
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