Thalberg, Sigismond - L?art du chant (2 SACD) - Wee, Paul

An international lawyer by day and a piano virtuoso by night, Paul Wee made his debut recording in 2019 with some of the most technically demanding piano music: Alkan's symphony and concerto for solo piano. Now he returns with music that offers a different, but no less challenging task: how to make the keys sing. The piano is essentially a percussion instrument – the sound is produced by small hammers striking the strings. Creating authentic legato – or the illusion of it – has been the goal of many generations of pianists, but few have taken it as far as Sigismond Thalberg. Thalberg, a giant of 19th-century pianism, was born in 1812, a year after Franz Liszt, his greatest rival on the international concert circuit. Compared to Liszt, Thalberg was often admired for his ability to make the piano sing, a skill he himself emphasized in a collection of transcriptions entitled The Art of Singing Applied to the Piano. Published between 1853 and 1863, the collection included Thalberg's arrangements of popular arias by Bellini, Rossini, and Weber, as well as songs by Beethoven and Schubert, but also other vocal works, such as Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem. Paul Wee presents this little-known but fascinating chapter in the history of pianism, accompanied by an extensive booklet containing his own liner notes and Thalberg's preface, which offers the master's advice to those who want their instruments to sing.