The Year That Never Was - レクオーナ 他: ピアノ作品集

新型コロナウイルスのパンデミックで世界が閉ざされた2020年、多くの人々が社会からの孤立に苦しみました。その中でルーマニア出身のピアニスト、マティ・ヴァルガは、強制的に与えられた「オフ」をスケジュールに追われることから解放されて自分を成長させる機会と捉えました。ピアノと一緒にいると、自分の内面がよく見え、新しい発見の喜びを味わったというヴァルガ。根っからの楽天家と自称する彼は、このアルバムが音楽の驚異的な力で聴く人に喜びをもたらすことを願っています。
ナクソス・ジャパン

The Year That Never Was in Romanian pianist Matei Vargas title here is 2020; he writes of how he came to embrace the COVID-era isolation and explored the work of Ernesto Lecuona, a composer about whom he had previously known little. The output of Cuban composer Lecuona is sometimes categorized as salon music, that gray area between classical and popular, and while it includes a few classical hits like the opening Andalucia (from the Suite espanola), much of his large production of some 600 works remains little explored. Here, the excerpts from the Danzas cubanas del siglo XIX and Danzas Afro-Cubanas will be worth the price of admission for Lecuona fans, but there are more arrows in Vargas quiver. He wants to expand the notion of salon music to include some of its predecessors, not only Chopin but going back as far as Domenico Scarlatti. One can quibble with some of his choices; he has a couple of Gershwin pieces, but the roots of Gershwins music are different, and Scott Joplin, a close musical cousin to Lecuona, might have made a better choice. Yet Vargas segues are convincing, and his concept is flexible enough to include offbeat items like Mily Balakirevs Spanish Melody and Romanian composer Andrei Tudors Rondo alla Crazy, which Tudor sent to Varga via social media during the pandemic. That pandemic seems to have produced a boomlet in recordings of salon music, which is probably understandable, and Vargas release is a novel take on the idea. ~ James Manheim