Piers Lane – Piers Lane: Goes to Town (2013) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Piers Lane - Piers Lane: Goes to Town (2013) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Piers Lane gambols delightfully through the twentieth century in this album of encores, party pieces and a few pianophile rarities, ranging from Dame Myra Hess’s unforgettable arrangement of Bach’s Jesu, joy of man’s desiring to Dudley Moore’s equally unforgettable Beethoven pastiche.

This album includes first recordings of, among others, John Ireland’s Ballerina and Mark Saya’s Offenbach/Chopin conflation Barcarolles. A number of these pieces are by Australian composers who wrote for Piers himself. His unbounded virtuosity and joy in the music is clearly an inspiration, and is evident throughout the recording.

‘This superbly recorded disc (played on a gorgeously voiced Steinway) is Lane’s love letter to the piano. I wish more pianists would share their guilty pleasures like this’ (Gramophone)

‘Lane in wonderful, debonair mode here, sparkling through a personal encore selection from Jamaican Rumba to a Toccata by his own father, and from Myra Hess to Dudley Moore’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘Puts smiles on our faces and tears in our eyes … Katharine Parker’s Down Longford Way grows from an Ivor Novello-like charm into an opulently Romantic piece of striking contrast and colour, indeed the perfect choice with which to launch the disc. The playing throughout is first-class: witty where it needs to be, reflective and joyous elsewhere … Lane is a dynamic, insightful pianist who is able to bring a new perspective to the repertoire. His renditions of the Grainger and Bach / Hess pieces are quite beautiful, and in Mayerl’s Marigold I can hardly imagine a more heartfelt account’ (International Record Review)

‘Piers Lane, one of the most versatile pianists around, presents many sides of himself in a selection of pieces that may seem topsy-turvy, incongruous even, but there are some wonderful and brilliant things here to be re-united with or discovered, and each piece is superbly played, with complete identification, and beautifully recorded too—just like a piano should sound, with all of Lane’s colours, dynamics and inflections faithfully relayed’ (ClassicalSource.com)

Tracklist:

1 Down Longford Way (No 2 of Four Musical Sketches for Piano) [2’34]
Katharine Parker (1886-1971)

2 Toccata (Movement 4 of Suite) [4’31]
Alan Lane (1932-2002)

3 Toccata for Piers Lane [1’53]
Anthony Doheny (b1938)

4 Ballerina [4’39]
John Ireland (1879-1962)

5 Jesu, joy of man’s desiring (Movement 10 of Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV147) [4’03]
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), arr. Dame Myra Hess (1890-1965)

6 Marigold [2’58]
Billy Mayerl (1902-1959)

7 Naila Waltz [7’29]
Léo Delibes (1836-1891), arr. Ernő Dohnányi (1877-1960)

8 Margaritki ‘Daisies’ (No 3 of Six Romances, Op 38) [2’32]
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

9 Dizzy Fingers [1’57]
Zez Confrey (1895-1971)

10 Barcarolles [5’42]
Mark Saya (b1954)

11 A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square [3’33]
Manning Sherwin (1902-1974), arr. Regis Danillon (b1949)

12 Nocturne No 4 in C minor ‘Bal fantôme’ [1’36]
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Alec Templeton (1910-1963)
Bach goes to town ‘Prelude and Fugue in swing’
13 Prelude [1’25]
14 Fugue [1’39]

15 Jamaican Rumba [1’01]
Arthur Benjamin (1893-1960)

16 The Tiger Tango (Movement 3 of Save the Animals Suite) [3’20]
Robert Keane (b1948)

17 Variations on a well-known theme [14’13]
Antony Hopkins (b1921)

18 Arabesque No 1 in G flat major ‘Filigran’ Op 5 [2’57]
Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933)