Pianist Imogen Cooper has specialized mostly in German-Austrian music from Mozart to Brahms. She has ventured into Chopin but is otherwise little known for French music. All is explained in an elegant booklet note from Cooper; the pieces on Le Temps Perdu (the title is from Marcel Proust) are ones that Cooper studied as a young woman at the Conservatoire in Paris as a teen and in Vienna with Alfred Brendel as a 20-year-old. For the most part, she has not played them since. One might or might not detect this "remembrance of ...
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Pianist Imogen Cooper has specialized mostly in German-Austrian music from Mozart to Brahms. She has ventured into Chopin but is otherwise little known for French music. All is explained in an elegant booklet note from Cooper; the pieces on Le Temps Perdu (the title is from Marcel Proust) are ones that Cooper studied as a young woman at the Conservatoire in Paris as a teen and in Vienna with Alfred Brendel as a 20-year-old. For the most part, she has not played them since. One might or might not detect this "remembrance of things past" in Cooper's playing, but there are many attractive points here. Most important, although Cooper offers the disclaimer that listeners may wonder what ties the pieces together, is that the program actually does have an interesting kind of coherence. Cooper herself seems to suggest as much, juxtaposing "jeux d'eaux" from Liszt and Ravel. The larger point is that Liszt's influence on French music has been underestimated, and Cooper suggests this nicely here. Another strong...
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