Special offer. Haydn: Piano Sonatas Volume 2
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano)
His playing in this second installment is quite as exemplary in touch, phrasing, characterisation and continuity, while the recorded sound is again intimate yet unconstricted...Bavouzet brings...
Special offer. Haydn: Piano Sonatas Volume 2
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano)
Purchase product
His playing in this second installment is quite as exemplary in touch, phrasing, characterisation and continuity, while the recorded sound is again intimate yet unconstricted...Bavouzet brings...
About
The multi-award winning and ever-popular Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is back with Volume 2 of Chandos’ highly acclaimed Haydn Sonata series. This new release follows Bavouzet’s complete Debussy cycle and a number of recent concerto recordings – all of which have been extraordinarily well received by critics and audiences alike, picking up numerous awards along the way.
Many leading pianists have tackled these at times technically challenging classical sonatas by Haydn, but in Bavouzet’s own words, this is a composer who always left the door open for new interpretations:
‘One often forgets how little information Haydn left in the text of his keyboard works: few instructions on nuance and phrasing, and very minimal tempo indications. Playing them is all the more fascinating for that, but it is also arduous and even risky for the performer, who must, even more than usual, create his or her own world and internal logic, only hoping – in the absence of tangible proof – that he or she is not straying too far from the composer’s intentions, forever out of reach.’
For the recording Bavouzet brought in a specially selected Yamaha piano which he feels gives the sort of tonal quality he is looking for, and it shows in the programme for Volume 2 which includes the elegantly virtuosic Sonata in E minor, No. 19; Sonata in B flat major, No. 20; Sonata in G minor, No. 32; Sonata in C major, No. 48, and Sonata in D major, No. 50.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
May 2011
His playing in this second installment is quite as exemplary in touch, phrasing, characterisation and continuity, while the recorded sound is again intimate yet unconstricted...Bavouzet brings a fizzing vivacity to the first movement of Sonata No. 48 in C...And in the solemn neo-baroque central movement of No. 50 in D (c.1778), his control of sonority and voicing of inner parts has a measured grandeur that is quite marvellous.
June 2011
Bavouzet is perhaps the ideal pianist for Haydn: his clarity of touch, quickness of wit and sensitivity to different soundworlds make him an empathetic interpreter...[he] makes the most of the contrasts between the pieces...The pianist is very much alive to their unfailingly fresh invention, delivering it all apparently effortlessly and without exceeding the necessary 18th-century parameters on the modern grand piano
July 2011
Bavouzet more than holds his own and, time and again, seems to offer a fresh ear to these sonatas, as if this is as much his great adventure as ours.
April 2011
These performances sound natural, appropriate and in perfect structural and expressive proportion...They are the work of an insightful musician of profound culture and wide interests, whose intellectual and emotional identification with Haydn is unreserved, and whose playing, beautifully captured in technical terms, is a delight to listen to.
16th April 2011
In the second volume of his complete Haydn cycle [Bavouzet] shines particularly in sonatas 48 and 50, the sprightliest on the CD, both with lovely reflective slow movements. Bavouzet offers the crispest of trills, a sprinkling of the fantastic, and a tender heart.
