Release Date: 29 November 2024
Label: Prospero Classical
Packaging Type: Digipak
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 4262353970676
Genres: Classical  Solo Instrumental  
Release Date: 29 November 2024
Label: Prospero Classical
Packaging Type: Digipak
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 4262353970676
Genres: Classical  Solo Instrumental  
Description
Posterity likes to play with labels that are supposed to characterize lesser-known composers: The Catholic Bach (Zelenka), The Spanish Mozart (Arriaga) - and The English Rachmaninoff, with which the English pianist and composer York Bowen (1884-1961) was labelled.
To this day, it remains a mystery as to why the English composer and pianist York Bowen has largely fallen into obscurity, and his music is unknown even to experts today – even though Camille Saint-Saens considered Bowen to be the "best English composer"…
Pianist Nuron Mukumi was immediately fascinated by Bowen's 24 Preludes, published in 1950 – each prelude has its own character and style, as if they had been written by another composer of the late Romantic period – and yet at the same time they are unified under a distinctive personal idiom that unmistakably marks the preludes as Bowen's compositions.
Nuron Mukumi presents the 24 Preludes Op.102 on PROSPERO. Indeed, one is immediately fascinated by this music, which is anything but a Rachmaninoff copy, but rather cultivates a style all of its own. And one wonders: how could these works be so easily forgotten?
Portraits of Bowen was recorded in the Teldex Studios, Berlin, with sound engineer Martin Sauer, who brilliantly realises the aesthetics of the preludes by using the silky-warm sounding Neumann microphones from the 1950s.
Additionally, no effort was spared with regard to the piano itself: in order to bring out the different characters of the individual preludes even more effectively, piano maker Daniel Brech provided his Steinway D grand piano with two differently adjusted keyboard mechanics.
Tracklisting
Solomon's Knot
Alexandre Foster; Heinz Holliger
Die Freitagsakademie
Nikolaus Harnoncourt; Philharmonia Zurich
Anna Bonitatibus; Adele D'Aronzo
Kathrin Hottinger; Edward Rushton
Ilker Arcayurek, Simon Lepper
Daria Parkhomenko
Nuron Mukumi