Release Date: 09 January 2015
Label: Bridge Records
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 090404945328
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: Sessions
Description
This new recording presents three major Sessions scores in stunningly virtuosic performances. A sonata in all but name, the Duo sees Sessions casting off the Stravinskian residue that had typified his earliest efforts. Rhythmically sturdy, the music provides something of a justification for the "American Brahms" moniker critics routinely applied to Sessions. The fiendishly difficult solo Sonata for Violin is in four interlinked movements. It is a "rhapsodic" (Sessions' word) score, that is among the finest works in the solo violin literature. Sessions' masterful Second Sonata was completed in the days following World War 2. Andor Foldes, the commissioning pianist, reckoned the 2nd movement "almost Chopinesque," while the finale, a sardonic toccata, (Sessions called it "a goose step") is a caricature of the Nazi Stormtroopers he had seen first-hand in Berlin. Though some of the contrasting music put Sessions in mind of the doleful-sounding foghorns in San Francisco Bay, the vehemence unleashed ultimately sweeps all else before it, topping off one of the most trenchant, dynamic piano works in the American literature.
Tracklisting
Danish National Symphony Orchestra; Odense Symphony Orchestra; Flemming Dreisig; Leif Segerstam; Mi
Partch Ensemble
Zeltsman
Yang:Odense So:Lazarev
Weiss/Orchestra Now/Botstein
Watkins:Van Steen:Bbc Now
Vassily Primakov:Odense So
Vassily Primakov
