Edna Stern

Edna Stern – Hélène de Montgeroult (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 53:21 minutes | 844 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Orchid Classics

The rediscovery of Hélène de Montgeroult’s music, notably her Complete course for the instruction of the pianoforte (more than 700 pages, including 114 Etudes, varied themes, fugues, and a fantasy), which can be found in several of the world’s great public libraries, brings to mind Georges Perec’s short story The Winter’s Journey, in which a young man unearths a long-forgotten book that seems to anticipate Symbolist poetry avant la lettre, a book of “plagiarism by anticipation” that will vanish for good later in the story. The difference is that today, Hélène de Montgeroult’s work, still extant, is asserting itself as the missing link between Mozart and Chopin. Her personality, doubtless too modern for her contemporaries – who struggled to understand her audacious chord progressions and her rich and complex polyphony – now sheds light on the French music of the nineteenth century prior to Berlioz, as it touches listeners who are now familiar with the language of Romanticism. She sunk into oblivion soon after her death. However, it is hard to imagine any of the great Romantics (Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, even Brahms) not having studied the piano on the basis of her method, who was popular at the time and was graced with a fourth reprint in Germany around 1830. And indeed, who would not think, for example, of Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude” (Op.10/12) while listening to Montgeroult’s Etude No.107 …

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Edna Stern – Schubert on Tape (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 53:36 minutes | 985 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Orchid Classics

Pianist Edna Stern offers her interpretations of the music of Schubert via a refreshing and personal method of recording, using analogue tape to record single takes of each piece in order to present the most honest and immediate performance possible. This ethos grew out of early experiences of hearing her own recordings: “I was shocked to encounter an interpretation that I myself could never have played or even imagined”, and it was this that prompted Edna Stern “to go back to a mode of recording practice that would more faithfully do justice to the music and Schubert’s humane masterpieces in particular”.
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