Charles Koechlin - Piano Music, Vol. 1 (Michael Korstick)

Information

Composer: Charles Koechlin

• Au loin, Op. 2, No. 2
• Nouvelles sonatines No. 1, Op. 87
• Premier album de Lilian, Op. 139: Nos. 2, 3 & 5
• Nouvelles sonatines No. 2, Op. 87
• Paysages et marines, Op. 63
• Nouvelles sonatines No. 3, Op. 87
• Second album de Lilian, Op. 149: Nos. 2, 4 & 8
• Nouvelles sonatines No. 4, Op. 87

Michael Korstick, piano

Date: 2008

Label: Hänssler Classic

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Review

Though it has still only scratched the surface of Charles Koechlin's vast and still scarcely known output, Hänssler has temporarily, at least, abandoned its exploration of his orchestral works to begin a series devoted to the piano music. There are nine works included in this first instalment; none is very substantial. The longest movement is the early seven-minute Andante Quasi Adagio with which Michael Korstick begins his sequence, while most of the movements in the cycle Paysages et Marines completed in 1916, or in each of the four Sonatines Op 87, composed in the mid 1920s, lasts around two minutes. Slight they may be, but all are pieces of a very specific and refined sensibility; the almost childlike simplicity of some of the writing belies its technical difficulty. There's nothing pianistic about Koechlin's piano music, for all its echoes of Debussy, Ravel and Fauré. Korstick never even hints at those challenges; his performances have exactly the quiet authority and poetry this elusive music needs. He also supplies the fascinating and informative sleeve notes to this immaculately presented disc.

-- Andrew Clements, The Guardian

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Charles Koechlin (27 November 1867 – 31 December 1950) was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his teachers at the Paris Conservatoire were Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel and Jean Roger-Ducasse. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars (especially Lilian Harvey and Ginger Rogers), traveling, stereoscopic photography and socialism. As a composer, Koechlin was enormously prolific, and was highly eclectic in inspiration and technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Koechlin

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Michael Korstick (born April 30, 1955 in Cologne) is a German pianist. He was a student of Hans Leygraf and took master classes from Tatiana Nikolayeva. Korstick also studied at The Juilliard School and spent several summers at the Aspen Music Festival and School. His repertoire consists of more than 120 works for piano and orchestra and a large number of solo works from all periods. He has made more than 60 CD recordings so far, among them most notably Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. From 2014 to 2022 Korstick was full professor of piano performance at Anton Bruckner University in Linz, Austria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Korstick

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