Basically Bull - A Pianist Explores the Uncharted Territory of the 16th Century Keyboard

グラミー賞にもノミネートされたピアニスト、アラン・フェインバーグは古典から現代までの幅広いレパートリーを持ち、これまでに300以上の作品を初演するなど意欲的な活動を行っています。このアルバムは彼のSteinway & Sonsレーベルへのデビューとなるものですが、こちらもまた独創的。通常よくあるレパートリーではなく、あえて16世紀から17世紀、エリザベス朝時代の英国音楽をモダンピアノで演奏するという挑戦的なアルバムとなっています。インスピレーションとパワー、情熱に満ちたこのアルバムには驚くほどの名人芸と共感が溢れており、大胆で冒険的な試みもなされているものです。
ナクソス・ジャパン

Performances of Renaissance keyboard music on the piano are rarely succesful; they introduce too many extraneous elements into the style, and the music collapses under its own weight. The cheekily titled Basically Bull, which includes music by John Bull and a few other composers of the Elizabethan virginalist school, may be an exception. Bull might be called the Liszt of the English Renaissance, writing virtuoso or otherwise extreme music that seems to try to break through its own boundaries. The effect of hearing the runs in the really difficult pieces, like the Galliard "St. Thomas, Wake!" (track 2), played on a piano is fundamentally different from that of a virginal or harpsichord; the effort of achieving the specified speed lends the music a brittle quality. Pianist Alan Feinberg, otherwise a specialist in contemporary music, forges a general interpretation to match these edgy virtuoso moments, using little pedal but a variety of hard attacks that emphasize the harmonic crunches and the daring insistence on the primacy of horizontal lines in Bull's music. Feinberg succeeds in re-creating the closed-in, somewhat fevered atmosphere of the conclaves of aristocratic music lovers for whom these pieces must originally have been performed, and he is aided in this quest by the engineers of the fine American label Steinway & Sons, which is gradually building a corpus of innovative piano recordings. Working in an unspecified location, they tamp down the piano's natural resonance and effectively amplify the percussive, intense quality of Feinberg's playing. Ultimately this album must be considered an experiment, albeit one in keeping with the spirit of Bull's music, rather than a straightforward performance of these compositions. But it is certainly one that will make you sit up and take notice.