Emma Abbate & Julian Perkins – Summer Dreams: American Piano Duets by Beach, MacDowell & Barber (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:18 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics
Both Beach and MacDowell were formidably accomplished pianists who wrote concertos in barnstorming virtuoso style, for themselves and their contemporaries to play, but they could also turn their hand to the lucrative domestic market for piano-duet music. In doing so they also tapped into the 19th-century, Romantic preoccupation with childhood which Schumann had encapsulated in his Kinderszenen of 1838.
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Anna Pirozzi, Emma Abbate – Alfano: Songs (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 56:20 minutes | 1,93 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Resonus Classics
Franco Alfano was a major musician and teacher who enjoyed considerable success with his operas during his lifetime, but who has been overlooked for decades. Generally regarded as the regenerator of the Italian art song, the works featured in this album offer a generous overview of Alfano’s vocal output, from his Opus 1 Cinq mélodies, written in 1896 when he was a twenty-one-year-old student at Leipzig, to Due liriche per canto, violoncello e pianoforte from 1949, five years before his death.
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Emma Abbate & Julian Perkins – Tournament for Twenty Fingers (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:27 minutes | 974 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Initially enjoying popularity first in Germany-speaking lands and then in France, the genre of the piano duet (four hands, one piano) went on to blossom in England during the 20th century. On this album Emma Abbate and Julian Perkins present the complete works for piano duet by each of the composers selected. Palm Court Waltz, the Sonatina and Theme and Variations from Lennox Berkeley display Gallic traits, the consequence no doubt of his studies in France and his keen interest in the music of Satie, Ravel and Poulenc. While showing an evolution in the composer’s approach to tonality, every hint of seriousness is constantly balanced by elegant playfulness and diaphanous textures.
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