Tracklista:1. Secret Police2. Pink Fruit3. Indoor Gondor4. Caiaphas In Fetters5. Don’t Make Friends With Good People6. Exeter Services7. Half-Ruined Already8. Fireplace
The distinguished Soviet pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva is a name familiar to many as one of the greatest forces behind the wealth of piano talent to flood from the former Soviet Union during the twentieth century. She was born on 4 May 1924 and began playing the piano at the age of three, subsequently entering the Moscow Conservatoire to study with Alexander Goldenweiser and Yevgeny Golubev. She retained her close connection with the Moscow Conservatoire all her life. Indeed, her name was inscribed twice on the marble Roll of Honour there, first as a pianist, then as a composer. After winning the 1950 Bach Leipzig Piano Competition, Nikolayeva built up a phenomenal volume of repertoire, ranging from Bach to Bartók and beyond. Her interpretation of Bach on record won great critical acclaim. Whilst others used so-called 'original' instruments, Nikolayeva preferred to play Bach on a modern Steinway - always with great success. Her long working association with Shostakovich, and her great understanding of all aspects of his music, made her one of the leading sources of contemporary knowledge about that great composer. It was Nikolayeva for whom Shostakovich wrote his 24 Preludes and Fugues, inspired by hearing her Bach-playing at the 1950 Bach bicentenary Competition in Leipzig (he was on the jury), and it was she who premiered them in Leningrad in 1952.'The remarkable Tatiana Nikolayeva ... uncovers Bach's revelations as if they were her own' (The Independent)'Absolutely superb. Certainly I can think of no finer recording of this endlessly fascinating masterpiece, whatever the medium. Highly recommended' (CDReview)
Tracklista:CD 1:1. Is It Me Or You 2. Coal Tattoo 3. Blue Maiden's Tale 4. Company Man 5. New Year's Eve6. Stranded In Self-Pity 7. Glory Road8. Gold Dust Woman (featuring Grace Potter)9. Beat Down The Dust10. Wanderlust11. Spots Of Time 12. Hallelujah Boulevard13. Word On The Wind CD 2: (Bonus Disc)1. Company Man (demo)2. New Years Eve (demo)3. Glory Road (demo)4. Wanderlust (demo with Mickey Raphael) 5. Hallelujah Boulevard (live from Angel Orensanz Foundation, 12/28/2008)
Tracklista: LP 1 1. It Ain't Me Babe 2. You Don't Have To Walk In The Rain LP 2 1. Let Me Be 2. Love in the City LP 3 1. You Baby 2. You Know What I Mean LP 4 1. Happy Together 2. Grim Reaper Of Love LP 5 1. She'd Rather Be With Me 2. Story Of Rock And Roll LP 6 1. She' s My Girl 2. Can't I Get To Know You Better LP 7 1. Elenore 2. Outside Chance LP 8 1. You Showed Me 2. Sound Asleep
Tracklista: CD 1 1. Silly Billy 2. What A Way 3. Oh! Bondage, Up Yours! 4. Identity 5. Let's Submerge 6. Plastic Bag 7. I Live Off You 8. I Am A Cliché 9. I Can't Do Anything 10. Oh! Bondage, Up Yours! 11. Obsessed With You 12. Let's Submerge 13. Plastic Bag 14. I Live Off You 15. I Am A Cliché 16. I Can't Do Anything 17. The Day The World Turned Day-Glo 18. Oh! Bondage, Up Yours! 19. Genetic Engineering 20. Art-I-Ficial 21. Germ Free Adolescents 22. Age 23. Warrior In Woolworths 24. Obsessed With You 25. The Day The World Turned Day-Glo 26. Age CD 2 1. Oh! Bondage, Up Yours! 2. I Am A Cliché 3. The Day The World Turned Day-Glo 4. I Am A Poseur 5. Identity 6. Let's Submerge 7. Germ Free Adolescents 8. Age 9. Art-I-Ficial 10. Obsessed With You 11. Warrior In Woolworths 12. I Can't Do Anything 13. Gentic Engineering 14. I Live Off You 15. Plastic Bag 16. Highly Inflammable 17. Prefabricated Icon 18. I Can't Do Anything 19. Warrior In Woolworths 20. Genetic Engineering 21. Art-I-Ficial 22. I Am A Poseur 23. Identity 24. Germ Free Adolescents 25. Warrior In Woolworths 26. Age
Tracklista:1. Egyptian Cream2. Another Bubble3. I'm Only You4. My Wife And My Dead Wife5. Goodnight I Say6. The Man With The Lightbulb Head7. Insect Mother8. Strawberry Mind9. Glass10. The Fly11. Heaven12. Bells of Rhymney13. Some Body14. Heaven15. Pit Of Souls16. The Drowning Church17. The Man With The Lightbulb Head (Instrumental)18. Lady Obvious
Tracklista:1. I. Allegro vivace 00:13:21 2. II. Andante 00:07:30 3. III. Scherzo: Presto 00:03:55 4. IV. Thema with Variations: Andante 00:07:14 5. V. Finale: Allegro giusto 00:06:52 6. Adagio - Allegro vivace 00:14:10
When we encounter this work for the first time, we discover a new song landscape – a delightfully hybrid country where Italian folk earthiness is wedded to the highest German art. Wolf had already proved himself a giant of the lied in his settings of Mörike (1888), Goethe (1888/9) and others, and he had long been adept at inspired syntheses of word and tone. But by 1890 the composer had reached a phase in his life where he no longer needed the monumental grandeurs of German literature to achieve his ends. He had already turned his gaze south to the Mediterranean; the songs of the Spanisches Liederbuch strike a new hedonistic note in his work. But the surprise of the Italienisches Liederbuch (translations by Paul Heyse of essentially anonymous folk lyrics drawn from collections by Tommaseo, Tigri, Dalmedico and others) is that the composer also delights in the joys of Lilliput, and ‘Auch kleine Dinge …’, the opening song in the set, is the very work to declare his new miniaturist sympathies.The song microscope (an instrument yet to be invented by science but long at the disposal of Wolf enthusiasts) shows that the amalgam of music and poetry which is the Italienisches Liederbuch is a volatile substance teeming with frantic activity, unguessed-at by the many, invisible and inaudible to the uninformed ear and eye, and yet hugely colourful when viewed through the right lens and heard through the right amplifier. Multitudinous protons and neutrons jostle within even the simplest of song texts, and Wolf at the height of his powers, in Einsteinian fashion, knew how to harness the secret power of these atoms of poetry to create a music of explosive power – music which belies its modest dimensions. The intense human activity of an Italian village is mirrored by a parade of the tiniest and most subtle musical devices and inflections seemingly with lives of their own, and with the sophistication and the inevitability of living organisms. The people depicted in Heyse’s collection are atoms of society, part of a bustling and vibrant community, yet somehow anonymous in that their behaviour in love – or when angry, spiteful, or laughing – is archetypal, as repetitive and inevitable as life itself. And as a result of the composer entering into the spirit of these words in the most profound way, there is in this combination of music and poetry a timelessness which places the work far beyond the realms of nineteenth-century song and Italian pastiche.The work is about patterns of life – ever changing, and yet ever the same. A celebration of these living litanies in Wolf’s hands is no less than life-enhancing. We hear what is going on beneath the surface to such an extent that we do not stop to ask whether these rispetti are contemporary with Cosimo de Medici, Vittorio Emmanuele or Mussolini. A staged and costumed Italienisches Liederbuch would thus reveal nothing that we cannot already hear in the music; the point of Wolf’s writing is to lead us deep into the poetry with the smallest number of extraneous distractions. The banalities of mere story-telling are transcended by a scenario which needs no lighting because it is brilliantly lit from within; it needs no mise-en-scène because it is bound together by the variety and unpredictability of life itself. The composer himself is the conductor, for he left the performers more than enough detailed instructions to remain firmly in charge. Of the cast of three, the pianist is rooted firmly to the spot, hopefully in front of a better instrument than could ever be found in an Italian village, and the other two alternate in song without ever combining their voices in duet. Only once, or possibly twice, does the composer permit them to address each other directly. Many an opera lover would find this a distinctly unpromising recipe for an evening’s entertainment. And yet if we use our ears and listen to our hearts we have to declare that here is a triumph of the lied over the operatic form sacred to the real Italians. This is only one of the delicious paradoxes of a work, so small and yet so large, so complex yet so simple, which is one of the enduring masterpieces of the civilized world.Wolf never heard both parts of his Italienisches Liederbuch together, although a letter of October 1893 to Dr Strecker in Mainz shows that a complete performance of the work – at a time when only twenty songs existed – was planned. Although this plan never came to fruition, the work is comparable to Schubert’s Winterreise in that both composers and their friends seem to have regarded Book I of their respective cycles (a halfway house in each case) as finished works worthy of performance in their own right.The absence of a performing tradition of the Italienisches Liederbuch in the composer’s own lifetime has given later performers carte blanche in deciding a performing order for the songs. This has been encouraged by the publication of a Wolf handbook by Edition Peters in which various running orders are suggested, and by the late Erik Werba who also concocted and published a number of different sequences, some of which have been recorded. Countless singers and pianists have had a great deal of fun shuffling the songs to make connections between them on the basis of ‘she said to him’ and ‘he then said to her’. The enjoyable thing about this is that the work can seem subtly different each time, but there are also a number of dangers. It seems a mistake, for reasons outlined above, to attempt to operaticize Wolf’s cycle (it has been ‘staged’ in American music colleges more than once), but it is also important to acknowledge that the ‘cycle’ is in fact two separate works, one completed in 1891 and the other in 1896. Greater stylistic differences (and much more time) separate these two books than separate the two books of Winterreise. The second Italian set has a different mood and certainly a different style of piano accompaniment. As the work is usually given with an interval, it seems only wise to allow those twenty minutes to stand for the five-year gap between the two groups of songs.When Felicity Lott, Richard Jackson and I performed the work for the first time (at the Purcell Room, London, in October 1975, in honour of Flora Nielsen’s 75th birthday) I devised an order which mixed the two parts unmercifully, grouping songs under sub-headings taken from Tommaseo’s Canti Toscani – one of the sources of Heyse’s translations. Thus the songs were arranged together under ‘L’amore ineguale’, ‘Serenate’, ‘Preghiere e rimproveri’ and so on. This seemed a good idea at the time, but I am now convinced that the composer knew exactly what he was doing when he made his own order for publication. For each of the two books Wolf chooses a wonderful motto song, and for each of them a high-spirited virtuoso finish. Throughout there are subtle juxtapositions of key, metre and tempo to provide contrast and relief, except where the composer wishes to suggest a link when certain songs seem to glide into each other.It was the late Walter Legge who impressed on me (during long sessions with my young colleagues in 1975 as well as with Schwarzkopf in 1976) that of all composers Hugo Wolf was master, if not of his own sad destiny, then of his songs. His relationships with publishers were fraught with difficulty precisely because he was so punctilious about the exact pagination of his music. If he had a recital programme printed he supervised each detail of it, including the flowers which embellished the foot of each page. His relationship with singers (whom he regarded as mostly stupid) was always tense because he demanded absolute fidelity to his intentions. He was unquestionably a tyrant in matters musical and Legge continued this tradition with great relish, arriving at my door to coach the young team with a cigar in one hand and a metronome in the other, both instruments of torture in their various ways. I am extremely grateful to him now, however, because he showed us that, in terms of his own music, Wolf knew best. No other composer has left so many detailed instructions (including metronome marks) for a set of songs; to obey Wolf’s dynamics and tempo indications as far as possible (far easier said than done) is to obtain the best results on the concert platform. Having come to admire the way that the composer is able to ‘rule from the grave’ (something that I believe was his intention as far as his songs are concerned) it is inconceivable to me that, having been composed with immense effort and superhuman care, the songs of the Italienisches Liederbuch were thrown together in an arbitrary sequence on the whim of the moment, and without that careful thought and intention which is the Absicht of the obsessively controlling artist. In the composer’s own order, which on the whole eschews quasi-operatic resonances of dialogue and cute response, we hear the kaleidoscope of village life (rather than see it) and our ears are encouraged to listen to all the riches which lie beneath these serenades, laments and dramatic confrontations. This is the way the composer carefully planned to present his work to posterity.I confess to one departure from this which I think has a certain musicological validity. The ‘hatching’ of a work like this on a stop-go basis with gaps of years and a sudden deluge of creativity is highly fascinating. I have presented a performance of the cycle in Wigmore Hall, and again at the Walton Estate on Ischia, in which the songs were performed in the order in which they were composed. They were linked by readings from the composer’s letters to friends which showed the various moods of elation and depression which governed the work’s genesis. This order has the advantage of course of not mixing songs from the two periods. We were denied the excitement of ‘Ich hab’ in Penna …’ to end the evening, but had the hauntingly beautiful (and also appropriate) ‘Was für ein Lied …’ instead. Presenting an evening like this shows the cycle as ‘work in progress’, but I remain convinced that the best order for a recording is the composer’s own.
Tracklista: CD 1 1. You Give Me Something 2. Hold Back the River 3. Babylon 4. Better Together 5. Let Her Go 6. I'm Yours 7. Heartbeats 8. Come Away With Me 9. Back to Black 10. Take Me to Church 11. Only Love 12. September Song 13. Better Man 14. Something to Talk About 15. Dream Catch Me 16. Another Love 17. Suddenly I See 18. Video Games 19. Love & Hate 20. She Said CD 2 1. AKA. . . What a Life! 2. Wild Wood 3. Fields of Gold 4. Ironic 5. Cornflake Girl 6. If It Makes You Happy 7. This Is the Life 8. Put Your Records On 9. Warwick Avenue 10. Skinny Love 11. The Closest Thing to Crazy 12. I Should've Known 13. Silence 14. Call Me 15. Riptide 16. Quicksand 17. Be Your Man 18. Fever to the Form 19. These Are the Days 20. Let Me Go CD 3 1. All of Me 2. Stay With Me 3. Fallin' 4. Read All About It 5. Breathe Me 6. Say You Love Me 7. No Such Thing 8. Lightning Bolt 9. When You Love Someone 10. Love Is a Losing Game 11. Between the Bars 12. Polaroid Picture 13. Bruises 14. Young & Free 15. Sweet Pea 16. We Are Stars 17. Terrified 18. Take Me Home 19. Grow 20. Hallelujah
Tracklista:1. Generation Upstart2. We May Not Have Tomorrow (But We Still Have Tonight)3. Down In The Alley Again4. Acting Singles5. Turning A Shack Into A Chapel6. Where Are You Tonight7. Closest I Ever Been To Memphis8. You Got Nothing On Me9. Come Easy Come Slow10. Put Your Hands Together11. If I Ever Fall In Love With You12. Make It To The Shore