Saturday 1 January 2011

As I've remarked previously, the shuffle-play facility on CD players is not often relevant to classical music. But sometimes it does come into its own, like this evening. Yevgeny Sudbin plays 18 piano sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti (and very good they are, too). Shuffle-play prevents over-familiarisation with the first ten or so. Then on to 19 tracks of Kreisler pieces, played most enjoyably by Ulrike-Anima Mathé, a CD I haven't taken off the shelf for a long time. The music is excellent; no wonder it is still going strong after over a hundred years. And I like Mathé's playing; she understands that Kreisler's music does not respond well to dawdling and over-sentimentalising, and she understands the Viennese dance rhythms that underlie so many of the pieces. A good hour's listening, and another excellent candidate for the shuffle-play (there are no multi-track pieces on either this or the Scarlatti CD).

No comments: