Steven Graff News
American musician
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2024-03-29
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2021-09-27 07:00:43
Orchestras are starting back into live, in-person events and it’s clear everyone is happy to be back. In San Francisco, they even managed to get a good laugh out of wearing masks. The 9/23/21 edition of SFGate.com published an article by Amy Graff that reported on a live movie music concert that featured the film The Princess Bride that had a line which left the audience in tears (in a good ...
2020-10-19 04:58:00
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4 (CD review)
Also Coriolan and The Creatures of Prometheus Overtures. Kristian Bezuidenhout, fortepiano; Pablo Heras-Casado, Freiburger Barockorchester. Harmonia Mundi HMM 902413.By John J. PuccioAnother Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto? So, what sets this one apart from the other 800 recordings of the concerto in the catalogue? Well, for starters, this one is played by a period-instrument ensemble, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, and they’re pretty darn good. Second, the soloist is Kristian Bezuidenhout, and he, too, is pretty darned good. And to cap off a good thing, Bezuidenhout plays the piece on a copy of an 1824 Graff fortepiano, one that might have been used in Beethoven’s own time. If it’s authenticity you’re after, this issue might be the ticket.Beethoven wrote his Piano Concerto No. 4 in G, Op. 58 between 1805 and 1806 (around the same time he wrote the Fourth Symphony and parts of the Fifth Symphony) premiering it in 1807 with the […]
2018-01-25 15:15:19
Melnikov beautifully plays four historic pianos – including an 1820s Alois Graff – on a rewarding disc of Stravinsky, Schumann and more. Plus, the verdict on other must-listen classical albums out this week Alexander Melnikov has already made a number of recordings of chamber music using historic pianos – Beethoven piano trios on an instrument made by Alois Graff in the 1820s, Schumann on a Streicher of 20 years later – and his latest disc extends those explorations into the solo repertoire, with a different piano for each of the four works he plays. So we hear the Wanderer Fantasy played on that same, beautifully restored Graff, made in Vienna around the time of Schubert’s death and now part of Melnikov’s own collection, while he uses an 1837 Érard for Chopin’s Op 10 Studies and an 1875 Bösendorfer for Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan, before opting for a modern Steinway for […]
2016-01-28 19:30:02
Stravinsky: Dumbarton Oaks Concerto; Concerto for Two Pianos; etc CD review – remorselessly energised music
Lubimov/Poprugin (Alpha)Alexei Lubimov has recorded Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas on a Graff piano of 1828, and Debussy on a Steinway from 1913, so it is no surprise to find him and Slava Poprugin using instruments from the first quarter of the 20th century for this collection of works for two pianos and piano duet by Stravinsky and Satie. Three of the works are arrangements – only Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Pianos (played on a 1920 Pleyel and a 1906 Gaveau) is as it was conceived, though the two-piano version of the Dumbarton Oaks concerto is Stravinsky’s own. Lubimov and Poprugin colour this rather remorselessly energised music very artfully, but it is the two works by Satie that really shine. John Cage’s austere transcription of Socrate is beautifully sculpted, its final moments ebbing away touchingly, and Cinéma, Darius Milhaud’s prepared piano-duet version of the music for Entr’acte in the 1924 ballet […]
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- timeline: Performers (North America).
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