Josu de Solaun

Josu de Solaun – Nocturnes on the Margins (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 53:30 minutes | 489 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © MarchVivo

This is a live recording of the concert given by Josu de Solaun in the auditorium of the Fundación Juan March in Madrid on 30 March 2019. Part of the Foundation’s “Música en la noche” (Music at night) series, the recital offered a different interpretation of one of the most popular solo piano genres: the nocturne. Rather than focusing on the canonical works of Chopin, this programme explores the less familiar margins of the repertoire, transporting the listener to a night without frontiers. Eight composers of five different nationalities (American, Italian, French, Romanian and Bulgarian) together create an alternative and light-filled vision of the nocturne. In the words of the pianist himself, “this album of crepuscular thoughts and melting music is an invitation to the dream world: a journey to the far reaches of the night”.

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Josu de Solaun – Enescu: Complete Works for Solo Piano (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 03:32:26 minutes | 3,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Grand Piano

This set of George Enescu’s solo piano music traces a fascinating musical arc from his precocious years in Vienna and Paris, where he absorbed Brahmsian and French late-Romantic influences, notably in the Impromptus, to the brilliantly mercurial Piano Sonata No. 3. Whether in the Pièces impromptues, eloquent character pieces, or in the oceanic Piano Sonata No. 1, Enescu remains, in Pablo Casals’ words, ‘the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart’, his unique musical language embracing Bach as well as the abiding vitality, and melancholy, of his native Romanian folk music.
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Josu de Solaun – Digressions (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:18:26 minutes | 654 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © IBS Classical

Here is a recording that combines the aesthetic value of music together with the musical works’ historical underpinnings. The pianist Josu De Solaun offers us his interpretation of two of the most significant pieces of the Romantic period: Davidsbündlertänze (1837) by Robert Schumann (1819-1856), the Spring and revolutionary high point of a first Romanticism, and two works by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), heterodox and conflicting protagonists of an autumnal kind of Romanticism: the Intermezzi, Op. 117 (1892) and the Klavierstücke, Op. 118 (1893). At the same time, the performer proposes a title that, on the one hand, supports his interpretative ideas and, on the other, aims to be a guide for our understanding and comprehension of how many singularities articulate the content of the recording: “Digressions”, a title suggesting a kind of reflection that sets in during the flow of the musical works themselves.
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Josu De Solaun – Haydn: Piano Sonatas (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:57:03 minutes | 1,62 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © IBS Classical

After this preamble or subtle captatio benevolentiae, I will tell you that in 1992, at the age of ten, I gave my first public recital in the beautiful monastery of Santa Maria del Puig, founded no less than in 1240 near Valencia and where my parents had married in 1980. I could not have imagined that only seven years later I would go to live and study in New York and that Haydn would accompany me on that difficult journey as a fragile but permanent connection to my childhood… And in that 1992 recital, the main score of the evening was a Haydn Sonata, one of the ones I include on this CD: the Sonata in D Major Hob. XVI/14, which is so full of tenderness and of a serene bucolic-pastoral luminosity. It is an inner idyll of simple but sublime grandeur. And so began the red thread that represents Haydn in my life, a kind of locus amoenus (a pleasant place) where I have so often found, and continue to find, solace, consolation and shelter. In my childhood, everyone loved Mozart and Beethoven. Haydn was the ugly duckling. I always felt I was an ugly duckling and maybe that is also why I loved him so much from the beginning…
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