The adage "you are never too old to learn" certainly holds true for master pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya. Anyone who surveys her decades-long career will certainly notice her fondness for the German piano repertoire. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, it all passes by frequently with forays into the French and Russian repertoire. With this CD, the 77-year-old pianist takes a new direction,
… as this time she sets her sights on the Second Viennese School. For composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, things had to be radically different at the beginning of the 20th century. Schoenberg's flirtation with atonality and the resulting twelve-tone technique became the "new normal" for his pupils Berg and Webern. Yet, as innovative as the ideas were, the sound world remained tied to that of the nineteenth century by all sorts of threads. Leonskaja is fully committed to this with this album. Her vast knowledge and expertise of Romantic piano music comes in handy. Berg's Piano Sonata op. 1 sounds under Leonskaya's hands like a congealed Brahms. Even Webern's Variations, op. 27, the most thoroughly dodecaphonic piece on the album, retains a certain romantic glow. Whether the composer would have agreed doesn't really matter. Leonskaya's playing is more than convincing (JWvR).more
