Andreas Staier – Méditation (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:55 minutes | 1,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Andreas Staier’s informed and inspired interpretations have left their mark on the discography of both the harpsichord and the fortepiano and have enabled us to see Bach, Mozart and Schubert in a completely new light. This is Staier’s first solo album of a projected series for Alpha Classics, in which he also presents his own compositions for the first time. “Two motifs connect the works in this recording: the first is a ancient cantus firmus, a melody in long notes […] the second is the interval sequence of octave, fifth, sixth, and third. […] Anklänge , my six pieces for harpsichord, grew out of several conversations I had with the composer Brice Pauset about what it means to compose in our time, and in particular what it implies to compose for historical instruments. This led me to ask myself how I could express and capture my own conception of music in notes, marked as it is not only by Byrd, Bach and Schubert, but also by the music of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Read moreAndreas Staier, Alexander Melnikov – Schubert: Fantasie in F Minor & other piano duets (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:00 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
“I have composed a big sonata and variations for four hands, and the latter have met with a specially good reception here, but I do not entirely trust Hungarian taste, and I shall leave it to you and to the Viennese to decide their true merit” So wrote Franz Schubert in 1824, evoking the popular 19th-century genre for 4-hands piano that publishers were always pestering him to write for. In his brief life Schubert devoted 32 compositions to this form and the least of these pieces, be it a lndler, polonaise or march, radiates with all of his finesse and sensitivity. Three are incontestable masterpieces, in the same rank as his sonatas or quartets: the Variations D813, the Fantasie D 940 and the Rondo D 951. All three date from the composer’s final years, a period that gave birth to his most accomplished works.
In concert, Andreas Staier and Alexander Melnikov have played Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, with Staier at the harpsichord, alongside Shostakovich’s ’24 Preludes and Fugues’, with Melnikov at the piano. Sharing a keyboard evidently suits them just as well; their unique musical complicity bringing together four hands and two immense talents.
Read moreLorenzo Coppola, Andreas Staier – Brahms: Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 120 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:13 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
The two sonatas for clarinet and piano, composed in 1894, were Brahms’s last chamber works. Knowing that he could count on the virtuosity of their dedicatee, the prodigious clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld (1856-1907), Brahms enthusiastically exploited all the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Under the fingers of Lorenzo Coppola, the clarinet prays, sobs, dreams or laughs, bringing astonishing conviction to all these varied emotions.
Read moreGeorg Nigl, Andreas Staier, Anna Lucia Richter, Petra Müllejans, Roel Dieltiens – Bach Privat (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:24:54 minutes | 1,52 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
This recording is an invitation to immerse ourselves in the musical inner circle of the Bach family. We are familiar with Johann Sebastian Bach as a composer of genius, but we know little about his family life, with the exception of the famous Clavierbüchlein (Little keyboard book) that the forty-year-old composer gave as a present in 1725 to his second wife Anna Magdalena, his junior by sixteen years. This manuscript is a unique document of the music the family played together. It provides us with a point of reference for the ‘programmes’ of these domestic concerts: it contains short keyboard pieces and songs alongside extended arias taken from the church cantatas, as well as chamber music. Bach and his two eldest sons were not only virtuoso harpsichordists but also excellent violinists, while the composer’s son-in-law Bach, J. C. Altnickol, played the cello and was an outstanding double bass player. Anna Magdalena Bach and her oldest stepdaughter both contributed as singers. And the still young children of the second marriage participated by playing easy pieces on their father’s various keyboard instruments. The musicians and singers on this recording, all eminent exponents of Bach and of Baroque music in general, have come together here to bring these exceptional moments back to life.
Read moreAndreas Staier – J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:49:09 minutes | 2,41 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
After a recording of Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier that earned unanimous acclaim from the press, Andreas Staier now gives us an equally poetic and flamboyant interpretation of the first book. At once architect and colourist, he constantly varies the atmospheres, unfolding an infinite palette of musical landscapes. Under his fingers, this immense cathedral in sound is revealed in all its thrilling diversity. An exhilarating experience!
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Andreas Staier, Le Concert de la Loge, Julien Chauvin – Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23, Symphony No. 40 & Don Giovanni Overture (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:57 minutes | 1016 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Julien Chauvin meets up with one of the great harpsichordists and fortepianists of our time, Andreas Staier, who is a leading interpreter of the Mozart concertos. He presents us with his vision of the Piano Concerto no.23 and its famous Adagio, ‘one of the most heart-rending slow movements ever written by Mozart… Performers often tend to take it too slowly, certainly thinking that this will accentuate the tragic side, but Julien Chauvin and I spontaneously agreed on a slightly faster tempo, which respects the basic pulse of this movement in siciliana rhythm. When you start with the right tempo, it’s amazing how the whole discourse comes together perfectly, in a very logical and simple manner’, says Staier, who plays a magnificent instrument by Christoph Kern after a 1790 fortepiano by Anton Walter, the great maker of Mozart’s time. Also on the programme is the Symphony no.40, in which, says Julien Chauvin, ‘Mozart explores types of writing that he pushes to their most extreme limits. This is the case in the finale, where we find a succession of dissonant disjunct intervals at the opening of the development which, on closer inspection, present us with the full chromatic scale (except for G natural, the symphony’s tonic). And so the twelve-note series was born!’
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Andreas Staier – Diabelli Variations (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:07:28 minutes | 549 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
In 1819, music publisher and composer Anton Diabelli sent a waltz of his own creation to all the important composers of the Austrian Empire, asking each of them to write a variation on it. His plan was to publish the variations in a patriotic volume called Vaterlandischer Kunstlerverein and to use the profits to benefit orphans and widows of the Napoleonic Wars. Beethoven chose to write not just a single variation, but a set of thirty-three. His audacious submission, the Diabelli Variations, has since become one of the most revered examples of the genre. On this fascinating disc, pianist Andreas Staier, playing a fortepiano after Conrad Graf, pairs Beethoven s magnum opus with a selection of the other works based upon Diabelli s waltz. Here you can discover the very first stirrings of Liszt s virtuosity (aged eleven), the music of Mozart s son, variations by Kreutzer, Kalkbrenner and even the great Franz Schubert. This fascinating album sheds welcome new light on both the music and the milieu of Beethoven s timeless masterpiece.
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Andreas Staier, Roel Dieltiens – Beethoven: Cello Sonatas, Op. 102, Bagatelles, Opp. 119 & 126 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:26 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
From the mid-1810s until the end of his life, Beethoven constantly tested to the limit the forms he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. His last two cello sonatas bear witness to this structural preoccupation, which was to open up so many new spaces . . . as do the final sets of Bagatelles, as disconcerting as they are innovative! Two genres shrewdly linked by Andreas Staier and Roel Dieltiens in these interpretations, in which eloquence merges with historically informed performance practice.
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Andreas Staier, Daniel Sepec, Roel Dieltiens – Schubert: Piano trios, Op. 99 & 100 (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:37:08 minutes | 1,67 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
‘One glance at Schubert’s trio, and the miserable hustle and bustle of human existence vanishes, the world takes on fresh lustre’, wrote Robert Schumann in 1836 of Schubert’s Piano Trio D898. He was equally admiring of the Viennese composer’s other great trio, D929, notably its funeral march-like Andante con moto, later to achieve cinematic fame in Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’.
Here three peerless interpreters bring out every nuance of these endlessly fascinating works on their ‘period instruments’, including a splendid copy of an 1827 Viennese fortepiano.
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Andreas Staier – Schumann: Variationen & Fantasiestücke (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:50 minutes | 943 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Counting the album of violin sonatas he made with violinist Daniel Sepec, this is the third Schumann release from historical-instrument specialist Andreas Staier. Staier’s recordings of earlier keyboard music had some really surprising sounds, but with Schumann, playing an 1837 Erard, it’s a realm not too far removed from the modern piano: better able to capture the intimate shadings of the Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, perhaps. But, even more so than in previous releases, Staier has come up with a really arresting program this time, and done it full justice. What it is is a sort of arch shape, featuring Schumann’s first published composition, the Abegg Variations, Op. 1, and the last thing he wrote as he descended into insanity, the Variations in E flat major (“Ghost Variations”), along with two sets of Fantasiestücke (the term came from E.T.A. Hoffmann), one early, one late. The Abegg Variations also fare well on Staier’s Erard, and he captures the explosive talent incipient in them as what seems to be a polite variation set morphs into something completely different. But the real find here is Schumann swan song, the Ghost Variations, which were suppressed by Clara Schumann and Brahms and are still rarely performed. Schumann worked on the piece after his suicide attempt, with radically altered handwriting. He declared it finished, but it has a sort of radical simplicity based on the theme that he said had been dictated to him by angels. People haven’t known quite what to make of this, but Staier finds profound things in the work, most of all the dissolution of the theme behind arpeggio “noise” in the last variation, perhaps the composer’s final reflection on what was happening to him. At the very least, it’s worth hearing. Staier is also superb in the later set of Fantasiestücke, Op. 111, which fit well into the general reevaluation of Schumann’s late works. Two intensely chromatic short pieces, the last with some very strange octave-displaced leading tones, surround a slow movement whose outer sections are almost completely static explorations of the resonances of a single harmony. This is a fabulous release that may singlehandedly rewrite the Schumann canon.
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Andreas Staier – Mozart Piano Sonatas K330/331/332 (2005)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:01:28 minutes | 496 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
We all know that Mozart had an impish sense of humour. Now we know it is shared by the gifted German pianist Andreas Staier, who permits himself authentically Amadean fun with his decorative conceits in these three inter-linked sonatas, especially in the celebrated ‘Ronda alla Turca’ from the most distinctive, K.331. But he also accords the composer due respect, bringing as much grace and poise to the contemplative slow movements as sprightly mischief to the pyrotechnical passages. In few hands can the fortepiano sound so expressive; at times, it is tempting to wonder if this is much how Mozart played his own works.
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Andreas Staier – J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:20:05 minutes | 3,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
With the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Johann Sebastian Bach left posterity one of the most dazzling masterpieces in the history of music. Formal rigour and musical emotion meet in perfect communion. Following several outstanding recordings of other works by Bach, Andreas Staier invites us to climb this Everest once again, but starting, as it were, with the north face, the second book, and revealing its poetry, its sensibility and its daunting architecture with the utmost naturalness.
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