Luogo e data di registrazione		-
	Registrazione: live / studio		live
	Recording Supervision		-
	Edizione LP		TELEFUNKEN - 6.42479 AP - (1 LP - durata 54' 04") - (p) 1981 - Analogico
	Originale LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		-
	Note		-

This collection of works documents with considerable variety "copyright cases" relating both new and less recent piano music. The generic term "Arrangement" - a word which almost sums up the history of classical piano music - in fact covers widely differing types of composition, which have been enlarged both in lenght and in intellectual content not least by the contributions of a succession of "post-creative" interpreters. Since Franz Liszt, in a congenial exercise which was at once review and preview, turned his attention to the organ works of J.S. Bach, and tried them out on the grand piano, since he produced his opera paraphrases, arranged symphonies and transcribed songs for the piano, the instrument has served for the transmission of essentially unmanageable pieces, and - in variance, pf course, with the talent of the pianist - has been forced beyond its natural potential. One pianist who has made it an integral part of his recitals to have the piano, as it were, overreach itself is the Frenchman Cyprien Katsaris. Music from an aesthetic no-man's-land occupies an important place in his wide repertoire, a repertoire which he is, moreover, constantly rearranging. In this respect, Katsaris not only ensures that he is acquainted with the whole range of piano adaptations, but also associates himself with his own post-compositional enthusiasm with those practices which have been characteristic of great piano virtuosi from Liszt to Rachmaninov, Horowitz and Cziffra. Katsaris's dazzling ability as a pianist, his feeling for chromatic nuance, his sensitive touch, which even in pianissimo passages evaluates the music revealingly, and of course his almost unrivalled reflexes where the most devilish technical difficulties are concerned - all this urged us to use live recordings of his playing rather than studio performances. Its is customary to play Liszt's thunderous version of Schumann's Liebeslied in the relaxed last stage of a recital, when musical and philological order have been satisfied. The extracts from Katsaris's recitals assembled here reflect his love of unorthodox literary "surprise attacks". Katsaris's interest here lies very much with the out-of-the-ordinary. On this record he explores musical fringe areas which remain a closed book to other pianists, either because they have shut themselves off aesthetically, or because they lack the technical capabilities. A particularly tricky piece is Cziffra's transcription of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Brumble-Bee; the work, which Cziffra first put to paper in the 1970s, is more of a semi-improvisation than a transcription, and leads the listener into the metaphysics of tremolo and martellando effects. Katsaris plays a shortened but harmonically enriched version of this veritable test of skill so innocuously labelled "Concert Étude". Katsaris's talent for spontaneous demonstrations of his compositional and improvisational competence are clearly revealed by his own composition on this disc. Katsaris took his inspiration from a kinetic object, "Le Cœur battant" by Yacov Agam, an Israeli painter and sculptor who lives in Paris. The little sculpture consists of nine interlocking bronze pieces, which, when set in motion, disclose a brief succession of different shapes and structures. Katsaris's improvisation came about spontaneously after the presentation of the sculpture at the Echternach concert in 1977, and attempts to translate the brief sequances of movement of Agam's sculpture into music. It is hard to imagine greater contrast than when Katsaris falls back from such free tonal language into the rhetorical constancy of the Bach Largo. Here is obviously a pianist who really is master of all the forms of expression available to him. This is made plain as much by Schumann's Variations on a Theme by Clara Wieck as by Chopin's fragile early C-minor Nocturne. Peter Cossé (Translation: Clive Williams)