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Epicurus.com - Gyorgy Sandor Plays Prokofiev
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List Price: $10.98
Our Price: $10.98
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vox (Classical)
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0047163551420
Label: Vox (Classical)
Manufacturer: Vox (Classical)
Number Of Discs: 2
Publisher: Vox (Classical)
Release Date: 1994-08-15
Studio: Vox (Classical)
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Editorial Reviews:
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Most of this music is not well known. Prokofiev buried a lot of imaginative music in sets like Tales of the Old Grandmother and Visions Fugitives (not to mention such imaginatively titled sets as Three Pieces and Four Pieces). For those who love Prokofiev's blend of lyricism and cynicism, there are probably many wonderful discoveries to be made in this set. Gyorgy Sandor's recording is rather dated, and he doesn't play Prokofiev's most virtuosic music with the same fury as he does Bartók's. But he is a musician of great resource and integrity, and at the super-budget price his excursion into Prokofiev is a worthwhile investment. --Leslie Gerber
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Some gems in this collection of lesser-known Prokofiev
Comment: This useful collection acts as a pendant to Gyorgy Sandor's set, also on Vox, of the piano sonatas, sonatinas and early piano pieces. Containing all the original piano music not on the piano sonata set (though not Prokofiev's transcriptions of his and other people's music) it gives a good picture of the composer's development from around 1910 until his return to Russia in 1935.
Taking the works on the disc chronologically, we start with the virtuoso Toccata--a triumph of demonic Lisztian energy--before moving onto the Ten Episodes, op 12. This is still early Prokofiev, though his mature style is already here in miniature: ironically swaggering marches, motoric rhythms and gentle lyricism feature prominently amongst the short pieces here.
More modernist--in fact as modernist as the composer's solo piano music gets--are the Sarcasms, op 17. These works are considerably more harmonically dissonant (though always clearly tonal) and bristling with brutalist rhythms. While certainly a stylistic advance on the op 12 set, they are not as fine as the Visions Fugitives, op 22, surely the greatest of Prokofiev's non-sonata piano works. This set of 20 miniatures (some very short indeed) conveys a huge emotional and stylistic range in its 20-minute duration.
By the time of Prokofiev's next piano pieces, his style was already beginning to simplify. The Tales of an Old Grandmother, op 31, perhaps isn't the best example of this--these are pieces for the student, charming as they are--but the Four Pieces that immediately follow it certainly represent a clear distillation of the earlier style into music that is simple yet strongly characterised.
The rest of the works on these discs come from that ambivalent, difficult time when Prokofiev was tiring of life in the West and moving back home to Soviet Russia. Like much of the music from that period, it's often deeply conflicted emotionally, and though generally fairly simple in nature the harmonies are often strange and unsettling. The two op 45 pieces entitled Chose en soi (Thing in itself) are the most ambitious of the solo piano works of this era, both being expressively and structurally diverse--in contrast the op 59 set is a group of simple character pieces, while the Pensees, op 62, are unified by a slow, thoughtful manner. Finally, the Music for Children--Prokofiev's last original piano work not to be titled Sonata--dates from just after his return to Russia. These are delightful miniatures for younger pianists to play, but obviously do not add up to a major work.
Gyorgy Sandor is a more-than-reliable guide to these works. If he has does have to cede precedence to other pianists in individual works (Argerich in the Toccata, Richter in various of the Visions Fugitives and the composer himself in other pieces, for example) this is still a very reliable traversal of these works--and at the price, well-night unbeatable value.
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