Intégrale des sonates pour piano

Description

Born in Bohemia in 1794, pianist and composer Ignasz Moscheles studied piano in Prague, composition in Vienna, and then began a concert career in London where he mingled with Mendelssohn, Chopin, Hummel, Liszt, and a certain François-Joseph Fetis, with whom he co-wrote the famous Méthode pour le pianoforte in 1840. He eventually became the director of the Leipzig Conservatory, where he passed away in 1870. His Piano Sonatas composed between 1814 and 1821 are works from the Viennese period. They represent a synthesis between the practice of the instrument and the art of composition (Albertchsberger), while also reflecting the Biedermeier taste of the time, a constrained romanticism and great elegance. In these four Sonatas, which have varied characters, Moscheles favors song, the cantabile so dear to opera (Bellini) in his melodies, but his virtuosic and adventurous substratum adorns his scores with writing discoveries accompanied by numerous technical difficulties, which earned him praise from Schumann as "the best sonata composer of his generation." The astonishing Sonata in a single movement Op.49 Allegro con passione is a tempestuous race to the abyss despite its title of Melancholic Sonata. The virtuoso pianist Michele Bolla, a specialist in historical instruments, plays, or rather transcends, this music on a Mac Nulty fortepiano after Conrad Graf (1819). A bellissimo disc! (Jérôme Angouillant)