Product Description

Alongside solo recordings of various composers on the sordino pedal, Jura Margulis now presents a life-long dream with this: a piano duo with Martha Argerich, live from Lugano in 2014, performing his own transcription for two pianos of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain.

Review

Around this time last year, she appeared on a record of Yiddish songs recorded by Myriam Fuks, exposing a part of her identity she had always kept concealed (it was my Album of the Week on Sinfini, September 2014). And now she's turned up as the better half of a piano duo in a new two-piano arrangement of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain by her good friend Jura Margulis. And these are no ordinary pianos. Margulis is a piano geek of high musical pedigree who has been seeking the authentic classical sound found on old fortepianos, an open-string effect known as sordino . He persuaded a manufacturer to adapt a pair of concert grands with his Margulis-Sordino pedal and sat down with Martha at her Lugano Festival to see how they sounded in his own adaptations of celebrated classics. Magical, that's how. But when you change the timbre ever so slightly on a grand piano, other problems arise. Martha was unhappy with her left-handed thumb D in the Mussorgsky transcription. Margulis resolved her qualm by playing the note on an orchestral tube gong. The audience were ecstatic. For the rest of the recital, Margulis delivers his own capable transcriptions of mostly familiar works by Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Liszt, Puccini and, most hauntingly, Shostakovich. It is in the Toccata from his Eighth Symphony that the pedal effect comes into its own, evoking the gut fear and total devastation of a war to the death. I've never heard Shostakovich sound quite so graphic before. If you're a piano lover, this is the one you'll want for Christmas. Norman Lebrecht Album of the Week ***** --Sinfini Music, 11/12/15

Transcription junkies will love this. --Gramophone,Jan'16