Goran Filipec – Bartók: Piano Music, Vol. 9 (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 55:09 minutes | 883 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Two important works dominate volume nine of this series. The first is Bartok’s substantial and ambitious late-Romantic Piano Sonata, Op. 19, a very early work, composed when he was around 17 before his studies in Budapest. It was long considered lost and is heard in Goran Filipec’s performing edition, prepared from the manuscript.
Zongoraiskola or Piano Method’ was devised in collaboration with composer, pianist and teacher Sandor Reschofsky who contributed the exercises. Bartok’s 48 original pieces are perfectly formed and charmingly refined, allowing him an opportunity to explore his ideas of piano pedagogy.
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Goran Filipec – Paganini at the Piano (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 55:01 minutes | 881 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
For sure, the most famous borrowings from Paganini’s Caprices to have been re-written for piano are those by Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov and Lutosławski – and generally they come only from the 24th Caprice – but countless other composers have had a go, to say nothing of the many arrangements for a thousand other instrumental combinations. Here, in the capable hands of Goran Filipec, recent winner of the Budapest Ferenc Liszt Society’s Grand Prix du Disque, we have two works inspired by Paganini and published between 1902 and 1914: variations, caprices, études, etc. written by Mark Hambourg, Ferruccio Busoni, Michael Zadora and Ignaz Friedman – all “virtuoso-composers” – and, closer to our times, music from the Croat composer Boris Papandopulo (born 1981), who has managed to develop an extraordinarily subtle and spiritual language, which pushes boldly at the limits of tonality. Delicious! And rest assured, it isn’t just the 24th Caprice which is put to work.
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Goran Filipec – Liszt : Poems (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:00 minutes | 1,12 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
All of the pieces in this programme have a literary or artistic connection as the background to their creation. Heard here in their first version, the Consolations owe their title to a poem by Alphonse de Lamartine and include a melody that later became the first Hungarian Rhapsody. The meditative Sposalizio was inspired by a painting by Raphael, and the Ballade by Gottfried Bürger’s haunting ‘Lenore’. Victor Hugo’s Après une lecture de Dante is used powerfully by Liszt to express damnation and hope, and the first Mephisto Waltz derived from Lenau’s ‘Faust’ depicts a dance both sinister and amorous.
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Goran Filipec, Kodály Philharmonic Orchestra & Imre Kollár – Liszt & Busoni: Orchestral Works (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:43 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Liszt regarded his compositions as living entities, never definitive, and susceptible to being modified or transformed completely. He held that the multiple versions of many of his own works, often for new mediums or ensembles, were a result of his tendency towards such an artistic ideal. The programme featured in this album can be seen as an illustration of these musical practices that powerfully illustrate the phenomenon of the arrangement.
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Goran Filipec, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Alvaro Cassuto – Braga Santos : Orchestral Works (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:11 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
For a time, composer Joly Braga Santos occupied a space in Estado Novo Portugal similar to that of Joaquín Rodrigo in Spain, writing attractive tonal works in a style somewhat insulated from contemporary developments. Through about the end of the 1950s he wrote music akin to that of Rodrigo or that of the English pastoral school, with skillful orchestration, a profusion of little tunes (there is nothing here that leaves you tapping your feet like Rodrigo does, but the four Renaissance-flavored miniatures are charming), and light folk influences. Then Braga Santos went to Italy in the 1960s. Conductor Álvaro Cassuto saves the best for last here: Braga Santos did not turn into an avant-gardist, but his music took on an edgier feel. The Piano Concerto, Op. 52, is a brusque, concise work that would make any audience sit up and take notice, and deserves full-scale addition to the standard repertory. Although Cassuto, a close friend of Braga Santos, doesn’t mention it, it seems as though Shostakovich served as a model here (and that would fit with the experience of living in a dictatorship). Sample the first movement, with its large, tense percussion section. The finale brightens a bit. Croatian pianist Goran Filipec, a specialist in virtuoso repertory, is competent, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic sounds great in its home hall, the Friary in Liverpool. Recommended for the piano concerto alone.
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Goran Filipec – Bersa: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 1 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:08 minutes | 852 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano
Blagoje Bersa was a major figure in Croatian musical life, his compositions a compound of Mediterranean, Central European and Balkan elements. His piano music, of which this recording is Volume 1, reveals a rich diversity drawn from Classical and Romantic models, encompassing charming Chopinesque barcarolles, a melancholic Notturno, a stirring Liszt-inspired Fantaisie-Impromptu, beautiful balletic miniatures and the Brahmsian grandeur of the powerfully conceived Sonata in F minor. Goran Filipec, recent laureate of the Grand Prix du Disque of the Ferenc Liszt Society of Budapest for his album “Paganini Studies” (Naxos Records, 2016), is a musician who never fail to capture the hearts of music audiences and critics. Equally known for his interpretations of standard piano repertoire as for discoveries of forgotten musical gems, this sovereign pianist of fiery energy and profiled artistic personality cultivates a particular leaning towards the classical and romantic repertoire and works of pronounced virtuosity.
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