Italian Inspirations
Alessio Bax (piano)
Awards:
-
Record Review, 21st March 2020, Record of the Week
An excellent and absorbing recital, played with panache and dedication.
Italian Inspirations
Alessio Bax (piano)
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Record Review, 21st March 2020, Record of the Week
An excellent and absorbing recital, played with panache and dedication.
About
Alessio Bax plays an Italian-inspired programme, picking his favourite pieces taken from a rich history of music from one of the most romantic countries in the world. He opens the programme with a J.S. Bach transcription of an oboe concerto by Venetian composer Alessandro Marcello, which reveals a deep insight into Bach’s mind.
This is followed by Rachmaninov’s last ever work for solo piano, which is incredibly eloquent, introspective and personal.
The Dallapiccola continues this eloquent theme, showing some beautifully crafted dodecaphonism. The recording is rounded off with two pieces by Liszt, which take the listener on a multi-legged journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, with beauty and drama along the way.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
-
Record Review21st March 2020Record of the Week
May 2020
An excellent and absorbing recital, played with panache and dedication.
March 2020
This Italian’s salute to his home country is inspired indeed...The standout performance is...a spellbinding account of the Dante Sonata in which Bax masterfully combines scrupulous observation of Liszt’s agogics and dynamics (trusting the composer here really does pay dividends) with quite thrilling bravura in which he throws caution to the wind. Few accounts of the first two pages are so filled with menace and mystery.
April 2020
He journeys from lyricism to economy in Dallapiccola’s Quaderno musicale di Annalibera, and if no one has equalled Wilhelm Kempff’s early Decca recording of Liszt’s Légendes, Bax’s performance of the first is nonetheless haunting and reflective. Finally, he turns up the heat, roaring and confiding Liszt’s rhetoric in the Dante Sonata to magnificent effect, with a truly visceral impact in the final bars. This is a most distinguished disc, finely recorded.
16th February 2020
an imaginative and quixotic mix...Bax finds unexpected reason and clarity in Liszt’s hellish chromaticisms and tritones depicting the Inferno, and musters the right celestial cascades and digital precision for Paradise
