Sergio Fiorentino - The Berlin Recordings [10CD Box Set] (2011)

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Artist:
Title: The Berlin Recordings
Year Of Release: 2011
Label: Piano Classics [PCLM0033]
Genre: Classical, Piano, Baroque, Romantic, Modern
Quality: 320 kbps / FLAC (tracks+cue, log, scans)
Total Time: 11:46:54
Total Size: 1.74 gb / 2.24 gb
WebSite:

This 10-disc box is Piano Classics’ most ambitious project to date, a tribute to a pianist who for many years was virtually ‘without portfolio’. Fiorentino shunned the ever-increasing necessity for promotion and publicity so that his glory was eclipsed by lesser, more commercially savvy pianists. His early recordings, where he was presented by the infamous William Barrington-Coupe (husband of Joyce Hatto) under a variety of names (Auguste du Maurier, Paul Procopolis, etc), were characterised by an immense but undisciplined facility, making the stature of these Berlin recordings, made at the end of Fiorentino’s life, all the more astonishing.

Wherever you turn you will encounter a human breadth and richness far removed from the often chilly aristocracy or froideur of Michelangeli and Pollini, his more celebrated compatriots. In Schubert you are reminded that, if for Keats ‘ripeness is all’, for Fiorentino naturalness is all. And, if he is arguably too benign or gemütlich in the Op 90 Impromptus (I am thinking of Paul Lewis’s recent disc – Harmonia Mundi, 2/12), he is memorably responsive to the A major Sonata, D664, to its ‘smiling lights and colours of a spring day’. He is no less superb in the A minor Sonata, D537, relishing its audacious and experimental nature.

Again, the sheer ease of his Chopin B minor Sonata leaves you lost in wonder: his Scherzo as ‘light as a hairbell’, his Largo rapt and communing. Then he is no less at home in heaven-storming Russian Romanticism, coming a close second to Boris Berezovsky’s long-deleted disc of Rachmaninov’s First Sonata. And if neither he nor anyone else compares with Van Cliburn’s magisterial rhetoric in his live Moscow recording of the Second Sonata (VAI DVD), his version is among the finest of those who sadly prefer the later and truncated 1931 revision.

Fiorentino’s Schumann Fantasie has all of his heartfelt eloquence (and what a fearless assault on the notorious skips at the close of the central march, the locus classicus of the wrong note). His way with the first of Liszt’s two Ballades makes a masterly case for what is outwardly one of the composer’s weaker works and his Sonata is among the finest on record, with the odd reinforced bass-line and emendation to suggest an endearingly old-fashioned affiliation. On the other hand, Fiorentino’s Bach is purer and less self-regarding than the often eccentric Gould and sometimes pedantic Rosalyn Tureck.

Finally, Fiorentino in Franck, where his unfaltering poise in the composer’s incense-laden notion of the ineffable contradicts Cortot’s mischievous reference to the ‘church-worker’ in Franck (‘le côte artisan d’église’). He makes nonsense, too, of James Gibb’s facetious assertion that in the Prelude, Aria and Finale, Franck’s sequences have ‘no more dramatic importance than the hitching up of one’s trousers’. Quietly sustained, luminous and intense, Fiorentino’s way with the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, in particular, is fervent and glowing, and it is somehow typical of his lack of virtuoso vanity that he resists a tumultuous rush to the finishing post at the close of the Fugue. The recordings are excellent and Piano Classics includes moving and affectionate tributes to one of the greatest pianists of the last century.

TRACKLIST:

CD 1
ROBERT SCHUMANN
FANTASIE in C major Op. 17
Recording: 19 October 1996 (1-3); 18 October 1997 (4,5,10), 14 October 1995 (6-9), 15 October 1995 (11,12) Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 73:14

CD 2
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Piano Sonata No. 13 in A major D664
Impromptus Op. 90 D899
Piano Sonata No. 4 in A minor D537
Recording: 20 October 1996 (1-3, 8-10), 18 October 1997 (4-7), Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 67:29

CD 3
FRYDERICK CHOPIN
Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor Op. 58
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat major D960
Recording: 8-9 October 1994, Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 68:17

CD 4
FRANZ LISZT
Ballade No. 1 in D flat major
Ballade No. 2 in B minor
Funérailles
La leggierezza
Waldesrauschen
Sonata in B minor
Recording: 18-19 October 1997, Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 76:42

CD 5
CÉSAR FRANCK
Prélude, fugue et variation, Op. 18 (Arr. Bauer)
Prélude, choral et fugue
Prélude, aria et final
Recording: 14 October 1995 (1,2,6-9), 8 October 1995 (3-5)
Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 67:19

CD 6
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN
Piano Sonata No. 2 in G sharp minor Op. 19 (Sonata-fantasie)
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor Op. 36 (1931 version)
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Piano Sonata No 8 in B flat major Op. 84
Recording: 8 October 1994, Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 63:11

CD 7
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN
Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor Op. 6
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor Op. 28
Recording: 14-15 October 1995, Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Producer: Remus Platen
Engineer: Siegfried Schubert-Weber
Total time: 72:21

CD 8
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Prelude & Fugue in D major BWV532 (Transcriber Busoni, arranged Fiorentino)
French Suite No. 5 in G major BWV 816
Suite from Partita No. 3 in E major BWV 1006 (Transcribed Rachmaninoff)
Prelude & Fugue in E flat major, BWV552 (St. Anne) (Transcribed Busoni, arranged Fiorentino)
Recording: October 1996, Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 65:39

CD 9
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Partita No. 1 in B flat major BWV825
Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor BWV1001 (transcribed Fiorentino)
Partita No. 4 in D major BWV828
Recording: 19 October 1996, Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 75:37

CD 10
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Suite Bergamasque
DOMENICO SCARLATTI
Sonata in E major
Sonata in D minor
MORITZ MOSZKOWSKI
Etude in F major Op 72/6
GABRIEL FAURÉ (Arr. Fiorentino)
Après un rêve
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Carnaval Op.9
FRANZ LISZT
Valse-impromptu
Gnomenreigen
Valse oubliée No.1
Recording: 15 October 1995 (7-9), 19 October 1996 (11), 20 October 1996 (10), 18 October 1997 (1-6, 12-14) Konzertsaal Siemensvilla, Berlin
Total time: 76:44