This regional Canadian disc -- pianist Boris Zarankin and youthful baritone Giles Tomkins are primarily known in the Toronto area -- displays an impressive level of original thinking and technical facility. First there's the overall shape of the program -- Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte (To the Faraway Lover), the first true song cycle, is usually joined with other vocal works, but here it is placed with two late piano works, the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, and the Bagatelles for piano, Op. 126. The grouping ...
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This regional Canadian disc -- pianist Boris Zarankin and youthful baritone Giles Tomkins are primarily known in the Toronto area -- displays an impressive level of original thinking and technical facility. First there's the overall shape of the program -- Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte (To the Faraway Lover), the first true song cycle, is usually joined with other vocal works, but here it is placed with two late piano works, the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, and the Bagatelles for piano, Op. 126. The grouping makes sense, for An die ferne Geliebte, although composed in advance of most of Beethoven's final masterpieces, is very much a late work in its compact but intense melodicism and its bits of almost naïve material put together in revolutionary ways. Better still, Zarankin's interpretations of the piano works are fresh. He takes at face value Beethoven's dissatisfaction with the instruments of his own time and opines that Beethoven's late keyboard works entailed "a quest for new...
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