Studio Masters

Jan Michiels – The War of the Romantics (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:38:05 minutes | 782 MB | Genre: Classical, Piano
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Fuga Libera

Franz Liszt drove a wedge between music fans open to innovative ideas and more traditional listeners. As the creator of the symphonic poem genre and programme music, he initiated a veritable trend of thought towards a new poetics. Inversely, partisans of Brahms felt that Liszt ran counter to the very essence of abstract music. On this digital only release, pianist Jan Michiels relives from the inside this “war of the Romantics” between progressives and conservatives through refined, intelligent readings of works by Liszt, Brahms and Schumann. But the pianist also offers a reconciliation from Schönberg, in its transcription for solo piano, combining the “traditional” on the motif with a form based on Liszt’s strokes of inspiration.
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Jan Michiels – Dvorak & Janacek: Slavic Soul (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:17:55 minutes | 620 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Fuga Libera

It was in Prague and Brno, the two largest cities in what is now the Czech Republic, that Antonín Dvořák and Leoš Janáček – the principal representatives of the nineteenth-century Czech national school, along with Bedřich Smetana – launched their respective compositional careers. While Janáček, thirteen years younger than Dvořák, saw the latter as a father figure, the two men shared the same poetic Slavic soul. Indeed, Janáček said of Dvořák: ‘I could exchange his personality for his works; it is as if his melodies came straight from my heart. Nothing can ever break such a bond.’ In his fourth solo recording for Fuga Libera, Jan Michiels places this shared Slavic consciousness and musicality in the perspective of the almost filial relationship between the two composers, for example by interspersing the pieces from two eminently lyrical cycles: Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures op.85 (1889) and Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path (1900-11).
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Jan Michiels – Bach-Busoni (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:16:58 minutes | 600 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Fuga Libera

For Ferruccio Busoni, Bach’s music was the root and the foundation of piano playing. His many transcriptions confirm this point of view, whilst his monumental Fantasia Contrappuntistica attempts to provide a conclusion to Bach’s unfinished Kunst der Fuge. Busoni received a great deal of criticism for this, to which he replied “the musical art-work exists both within and outside of Time… there is no Old or New. There is only Known or Unknown”. Today — one century and many fashions of “authentic” ways of performing Bach later — is possibly the time to rediscover the true voice of this great musician; for Bach, music was like “a divine child who did not touch the earth with his feet but floated on air”. Jan Michiels takes you into this divine air with an ‘old’ Bechstein from 1860 as well as with a brand new Straight Strung Grand Piano by Chris Maene.
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