Myslivecek - Complete Music For Keyboard - Clar...

Britain's excellent Clare Hammond, meanwhile, has been rummaging in the archives for keyboard music by the 18th-century composer Josef Myslivecek - hard to spell, harder to pronounce - who paved the way for Mozart, an admirer, and led a lustful cosmopolitan life.

Josef Myslivecek (1737-81) was 26 years old when he left his native Prague for Italy, where he studied with Pescetti in Venice and, a mere two years later, had the first of his two dozen or so opere serie produced. Italy would remain the centre of his activity - with three sojourns north, to Prague, Vienne and Munich - until his death of tertiary syphilis at the age of 44. In addition to his operas, there are some 45 symphonies, eight violin concertos, oratorios and a substantial amount of chamber music. Myslivecek apparently composed relatively little for the keyboard and virtually all of it that survives is presented in this attractive new recording by Clare Hammond.'

The two concertos are thought to date from Myslivecek's Munich sojourn in 1776-78 and, despite the considerable richness of the orchestral writing, the solo parts are considerably less demanding technically than Mozart or Clementi and less audacious than Haydn. Modest though their means may be, their charm is abundant, and both concertos are clearly the works of a supremely competent and gift musician, if not of a keyboard virtuoso. To Hammond's credit, she lets this appealing music speak for itself, never yiedling to the temptation of burdening it with undue portent or extraneous affect. Nicholas McGegan and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra (which will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its founding next year) are her supportive collaborators. The exquisitely poignant Larghetto of the F Major Concerto, with its delicately colours accompaniment of muted violins and pizzicato lower strings, is alone worth the price of the disc.

Clarinetist Milan Potoček plays in jazz-rock big band Savle Mece, in Blues Wave band (keyboard), he devotes also to composing and arranging, Accordionist Slávek Brabec is a member of the Prague accordion and keyboard orchestra Praco, plays in music bands Pilgrim Pimple, Psychohlína and the quartet Zeffiro.

Where will Clare Hammond pop up next? If she is not championing new works and recording their world premieres, she is appearing as the young Miss Shepherd in the film of Alan Bennett's 'The Lady in the Van' or giving us the complete music for keyboard by Josef Myslivecek. Now she turns her attention to the extraordinary Hélène-Antoinette-Marie de Nervo de Montgeroult...[Hammond's notes are] elegantly written and diligently researched [and in] her judiciously ordered selection, you might detect prescient hints of Schumann, Brahms or even Debussy...These are no dull finger drills but studies which combine technical exercises with music of depth and poetry. Nimbly executed, sensitively phrased, and beautifully recorded, Clare Hammond has left all pianophiles in her debt...An early contender for next year's Gramophone Awards"

Now you can get all 23,247 pages - 2.6 gigabytes of PDF files. That's right. In the two minutes it takes to order the collection, you can have a complete library of flute music to enjoy for years to come!

The variation set form dates almost back to the dawn of independent instrumental music, and its original function was to allow a display of the performer's virtuosity. Yet very soon, its focus grew to include the composer's virtuosity as well, extracting new music from the same basic materials. The duality has persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries, with the performer-virtuoso function diminished but hardly gone. Pianist Clare Hammond presents an intelligent survey of the variation form since the early 20th century, hardly exhaustive but giving a sense of the various ways composers approached their task. There is one virtuoso work, the Variations on a Polish Folk Theme, Op. 10, by Karol Szymanowski, and here, Hammond is brilliant. She shifts gears completely in the angular, partly serial Piano Variations of Aaron Copland, which the booklet notes term "conspicuously un-'pianistic,'" and which emphasize the variation form's links to the 12-tone procedure. Along the way, there is humor in the Five Variations on a Theme of Schubert by Helmut Lachenmann, allusions to jazz in the delightful I Still Play of John Adams, pathos in Hindemith's Variations, a stretching of the form itself in the interpenetrating variations of Harrison Birtwistle's Variations from the Golden Mountain, and a link back to monumental Baroque variation sets in Sofia Gubaidulina's Chaconne. It's an impressively varied program, and Hammond's treatments of each work are sympathetic. BIS's sound is a plus, too, originating in the entirely appropriate confines of England's Potton Hall. An enjoyable and absorbing check-in on the state of the variations art. 781b155fdc