Until the appearance of Pro Piano's Godowsky: Java Suite featuring pianist Esther Budiardjo, one of the great gaping holes in the recorded repertoire had been Leopold Godowsky's mammoth and valedictory Java Suite, composed in the mid-'20s. Godowsky enjoys one of the most titanic reputations in the history of pianism, yet his recordings and piano rolls leave a strangely uneven and mixed impression of his artistry. Godowsky's compositional output is dominated by transcriptions of various kinds, and some of them -- for example ...
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Until the appearance of Pro Piano's Godowsky: Java Suite featuring pianist Esther Budiardjo, one of the great gaping holes in the recorded repertoire had been Leopold Godowsky's mammoth and valedictory Java Suite, composed in the mid-'20s. Godowsky enjoys one of the most titanic reputations in the history of pianism, yet his recordings and piano rolls leave a strangely uneven and mixed impression of his artistry. Godowsky's compositional output is dominated by transcriptions of various kinds, and some of them -- for example, his transcriptions that superimpose one Chopin etude on top of another -- are so complex and difficult as to inspire bewilderment rather than awe. The Java Suite is also sometimes mistakenly regarded as a transcription of Indonesian music, which it is not; it is more like Godowsky's equivalent of Albéniz's Iberia, a large cycle of 14 piano pieces that categorize the extent of both his fertile imagination and technical resources. One of the reasons artists have been slow to record...
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