Lang Lang gets a partner

From Slipped disc:

"The Sony label, which paid $3 million to snatch Lang Lang from Deutsche Grammophon a few weeks ago, has swooped again to sign the violinist Ray Chen, winner of the latest Queen Elisabeth competition in Belgium.

Chen, 21, was born in Taiwan, raised in Australia and schooled at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He is represented by the same CAMI management as Lang Lang and will play a limelight concert at the opening of the World expo in Shanghai, mainland China, this summer - much as Lang Lang did at the Olympics.

Ray Chen is, by all accounts, a highly promising young artist. But his signing confirms the general direction of Sony's classical strategy. A label that shed all of its conductors and all but handful of instrumentalists is now headlined by Lang Lang, Yo Yo Ma and Ray Chen, three artists from the same country - which is the market the Japanese label is pitching for.

In a signing-day statement Ray Chen said:'I am very excited to become a Sony Classical artist and I am looking forward to this wonderful collaboration. Our joint mission is to capture the excitement, passion, and life in a performance of the finest quality and to bring them to the audiences worldwide'."

Review: Yuja Wang plays with poetry, precision

From SF Chronicle:

"Sunday's San Francisco Performances program, rescheduled from April, was yet another case in point. In three Schubert-Liszt song transcriptions to open the evening, Wang paid full homage to both composers. Her readings reminded a listener of how tender and dramatically resonant Schubert's original songs are and of how ingeniously Liszt captured those qualities in his versions for the piano alone."

I love Liszt, and I love his transcriptions, though I'm not sure if I've heard these ones. A pianist, in any event, to look up.

The Greatest Present-Day Liszt Pianist

The Greatest Present-Day Liszt Pianist:

"You can now watch Mykola Suk's incendiary Liszt Sonata on youtube.... - The Unanswered Question"

All art should be made the way that Liszt played the piano. All great art is. Let's hear it for Suk.

Reconnecting with Spanish Modernism -- and The Problem of de Larrocha

From the Unanswered Question at ArtsJournal:

"The defining austerities of Albeniz and Falla were irrelevant to the cushioned readings of Alicia de Larrocha -- one of three reasons we don't know or understand the efflorescence of Spanish modernism in the early 20th century...."

Call me unsophisticated, but I like de Larrocha's interpretation of Albeniz and Falla, to say nothing of her Mozart (I have a Mostly Mozart recording on vinyl) and the piano music of Granados, too. Her death struck me sufficiently--yet another great pianist I will never see in performance--for her to slip into a poem I was writing at the time. I imagined a little pas de deux to one of Grandos's Danzas Espanolas. I've always wanted to write a poem about Granados, specifically, the fact that he died on the Lusitania, but it hasn't come off yet.