Raff Piano Suites for Naxos

[Mark Thomas]

It's out today, and here's the first review. Suites No.2 and the monster No,4 are about to be recorded, so should be available next year, and the final pair, Nos.6 and 7, will follow on the final CD.

[TerraEpon]

Anyone have the CD (specifically the CD)?

While this is Grand Piano and not Naxos, which may make a difference, I saw someone mention the new Gounod and Shostakovich discs and they were CD-Rs...

[Mark Thomas]

My copy of the Raff suites is a full CD.

[Alan Howe]

And the pianism, as well as the music, is just astonishing.

[Mark Thomas]

I quite agree, Hyelim Kim is a real find. Judging by her performance of the G minor Suite on this first CD - such a huge advance on Alexander Zolotarev's - I'm so looking forward to hearing her interpretation on the second CD next year of it's predecessor, the D minor Suite. It's one of Raff's finest works in any genre and has had a number of recordings since Adrian Ruiz's pioneering 1971 Genesis LP.

[Ebubu]

The first in the new Grand Piano series covering all seven of Raff's piano suites should be released this October. It features the Suites Nos.1, 3 and 5, played with verve and sensitivity by Korean pianist Hyelim Kim. Some friends may have Alexander Zolotarev's recordings issued in 2004 by the now long-defunct AK Coburg label but, on the evidence of her performance of the Suite No.3 available on YouTube, Kim's performances will totally eclipse them. Speed is by no means everything, but Raff's music is generally on the sprightly side and in each of these works Kim shaves a significant amount off Zolotarev's rather "safe" timings:

Piano Suite No.1: 12:31 > 11:06
Piano Suite No.3: 16:31 > 15:19
Piano Suite No.5: 36:57 > 31:10

The second CD in the series will be recorded in November, so we can expect volume two to be released about a year after this one reaches the shelves.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nXRz31uawyRQTmyKAAUqd2LANQK_g67pg

[Mark Thomas]

Volume two of this series of three CDs will be released on 9 October, exactly a year since the first one came out. This time we have the magnificent fourth Suite, in D minor Op.91, together with the second, in C major Op.71. There's a promotional video on YouTube here. Hyelim Kim's exemplary pianism was amply demonstrated on the first disc, so we should be confident that these two suites will also receive at last the performances they deserve. The D minor Suite is one of Raff's finest compositions in any genre and has had a patchy recording career. Of the four commercial releases, Carnevalli is ludicrously slow at 43 minutes overall (Kim takes 35 minutes!), Zolotarev over-emphasises the baroque elements in a bloodless performance, and while Estrin, and particularly Ruiz, have more vitality and come closer to what we'd now recognise as Raff's idiom, their recordings are old and hard to track down. Full details and sound bites at Presto here.

[eschiss1]

I'm surprised Volker writes, in his notes to the Naxos recording, "By contrast, he barely touched the piano sonata, a genre that was overly indebted to Beethoven, composing just one example, the Sonata in E flat minor, Op. 14 (though this does come in two versions)." After all, it's in part due to Edition Nordstern that I -know- of the Fantaisie-Sonate.

[Mark Thomas]

I think Volker's point is that the piano suites suited both sides of Raff's musical personality - fantasy and structure - whereas the traditional sonata was much more constrained and focused on the latter. True, the Fantaisie-Sonate (one of his finest compositions IMHO) is called a sonata, but it's hardly a conventional one, being in one shortish unconventional movement; closer, in fact, to some of the movements of the D minor Piano Suite.