Shai Wosner

Shai Wosner – Beethoven: Diabelli Variations in C Major, Op. 120 (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 10, 2023 · Comments off

In 1819 the publisher and composer Anton Diabelli invited 50 Austrian composers to write one variation a short waltz he had composed. He specified that it take up just one sheet (which he supplied) and this already contained his waltz. Composers such as Czerny, Moscheles, Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Liszt (just 10 years old), Schubert and Beethoven were among those invited. All except one provided their contribution. That one was Beethoven, who, electrified by Diabelli’s Waltz produced a massive work comprising 33 variations which was completed after the composer had completed the Missa Solemnis, and the last three piano sonatas. He delivered it to Diabelli in 1823, making it his final masterpiece. This huge work is one of the peaks of the repertoire for solo piano, it still baffles the listener, it still has the capacity to reveal more than we thought we knew about it. It makes extreme demands upon the performer and the listener, and in a great performance never ceases to surprise and shock the listener.

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Shai Wosner – Impromptu (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 3, 2023 · Comments off

After his wonderfully quirky and highly praised Haydn & Ligeti album, Shai Wosner returns to solo piano repertoire for his next project. As always with this artist, there is something very different on offer – Impromptus by Chopin, Dvorak, Liszt, Gershwin, and Schubert rub shoulders with Beethoven’s Fantasy Op.77 – the nearest thing we have to a Beethoven ‘improvisation’. The composer did indeed improvise this work at a private house performance, then went home and wrote it down from memory! Ives’s Improvisations 1&3 round off an eclectic programme.

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Shai Wosner – Schubert: Piano Sonatas D. 845, D. 894, D. 958, D. 960 (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 1, 2023 · Comments off

Following on his critically acclaimed disc of Brahms and Schoenberg, Shai Wosner s second release for Onyx focuses on the music of Franz Schubert. Here he plays a selection of music including the composer s two late sonatas in fabulous performances that are sure to enhance his rising-star status. These works are in many ways polar opposites. Written in 1825, a year when the composer s health was robust and his finances in good order, the powerful, unfinished sonata D840 is monumental, stark and monolithic. The sonata D850, written at a time in the composer s life when he was broke, lonely and fighting with his publishers, is remarkable for its sunny disposition. This late masterwork was one of the few sonatas Schubert was able to publish during his lifetime and it brought him a very welcome payday of 300 florins.

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Ralph Kirshbaum & Shai Wosner – Beethoven: The Sonatas & Variations for Cello and Piano (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 16, 2023 · Comments off

Beethoven’s sonatas for cello and piano span his entire creative life. Sonatas Nos.1 and 2, dating from the late 1790’s, were products of his early years as a virtuoso pianist and aspiring composer in Vienna. Sonata No.3 dates from the composer’s middle period and is contemporary with his fourth and firth symphonies. Sonatas Nos.4 and 5 were composed at the beginning of Beethoven’s visionary late period and rub shoulders with his last violin sonata. These authoritative performances from cellist Ralph Kirschbaum and pianist Shai Wosner were recorded immediately after concluding of a tour of all five sonatas and the variations across the USA and the UK.

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Shai Wosner – Variations on a Theme by FDR (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · February 3, 2023 · Comments off

The collection opens with Derek Bermel’s Pequenas Memórias (“Small memories” in Portuguese), a work dedicated to his wife Andreia Pinto Correia’s immigrant experience as well as a reference to the great writer José Saramago’s memoir. Evoking his wife’s artistic trajectory and how living in her adopted country shaped her path, Bermel weaves in stylistic references to Bach, Chopin, Ellington, and the Beatles. An accumulating melodic figure in the right hand is embellished by jazz-inflected grace notes over a chromatic descending bass. The immigrant’s identity, represented by the core melodic idea, is subjected to the vicissitudes of this often chaotic country of ours, at times open to those born elsewhere and at others relentlessly inhospitable.

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