I bought this second hand in a shop in London, and i'nm so glad i did, this has become a treasured disc, i love these piano compilation albums, especially with short miniatures as here, well maybe not that much of miniature, 16 tracks at 72 minutes makes a good 4 minutes each, but it's good to have some strange off the beaten track pieces, Griffes / Balakirev / Liadov / Moszkowski etc, stuff which would be hard to get elsewhere, Tabe gives us a great selection, and Denon is such a great label, very inventive when they get it right, just switch onto random, and let the shuffle of chance bring you something different, this appeared in my Blog this time last year [1st November 2011].
Kyoko Tabe is Japanese, she's now 45, not particularly known in the West, she mainly recorded on the Denon label, stuck in Japan, and even though she's now recorded for Chandos, a lot of her discs are hard to get hold of in the West, she recorded this disc in 1994, the front cover picture is truly excellent, showing Tabe at the keyboard, looking through the lid / workings of the piano, a nice way to frame a photograph, and the lettering includes all the Composer names, a truly wonderful product.
Tabe plays these pieces very well, The piece that i enjoyed the most was track 6, Schubert's Impromptu 3 [D899/3], it's a tremendous piece of music, written in G Flat Major, it used to be my favourite Impromptu, but now that's Impromptu 5 [D935/1], this is so gentle and serene, those wonderful rippling right hand notes, they power the piece, at times they rise and fall in conjunction to the intensity of the left hand playing, usually the accompaniment is in the bass left hand, this really makes this piece special, as the 'background' rhythm is actually mid keyboard right hand, .
Here's Alfred Brendel playing Impromptu 3 [D899/3] on YouTube.
Here's Alfred Brendel playing Impromptu 3 [D899/3] on YouTube.
