Named a Concerto Choice in BBC Music Magazine September 2022!

The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and its Music and Artistic Director Jonathan Nott continue their acclaimed series of 20th-century masterpieces on PENTATONE, together with star pianist Francesco Piemontesi, presenting piano concertos by Ravel and Schoenberg alongside Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques. Each of these composers redefined 20th-century music in a highly personal way, and the works recorded here share a connection to the United States which one would perhaps not expect right away from these European master composers. While Ravel and Schoenberg’s piano concertos provide the most original and colourful 20th-century contributions to this genre, Messiaen employs a similar scoring to express his profound reverence for nature in Oiseaux exotiques. These challenging and multifarious scores fit Piemontesi, Nott and the orchestra like a glove.

Francesco Piemontesi is among the most-cherished pianists of our age, and presents the third fruit of his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE, having released the acclaimed Schubert - Last Piano Sonatas (2019) and Bach Nostalghia (2021). The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande is one of the world’s most respected orchestras with a vast PENTATONE discography. This is their third release on the label with their Music and Artistic Director Jonathan Nott, after Strauss, Debussy & Ligeti (2018) and the gloriously received Debussy & Schoenberg,Conductor:Pelléas et Mélisande (2021), containing Nott’s new arrangement of Debussy’s opera.

REVIEWS:

Francesco Piemontesi’s musicianship is both deft and searching. Here are stellar interpretations of three very different concerto-type works, ordered into a journey from easier listening to more difficult.

You have to envy the citizens of Geneva, regularly able to hear music-making on this level from their resident orchestra and conductor. Add a pianist in Francesco Piemontesi’s class, and here are stellar interpretations of three very different concerto-type works, ordered into a journey from easier listening to (notionally at least) more difficult.

Ravel was so determined to avoid portentousness in his winsome G major Piano Concerto the first work heard on the disc — that it can easily sound trite in performance. Any such risk vanishes in the presence of Piemontesi’s brand of musicianship, which is at once deft and searching; a special moment is the sequence of trills decorating the melody in the first movement’s cadenza, marvellously judged to sound as if the notes are somehow gliding, rather than stepping from one to the next.

Without any compromising sense of a soft- focus paraphrase, the music is nonetheless delivered with a sureness of touch and purpose that absorbs and, as often as not, beguiles the ear.

--BBC Music (Malcolm Hayes)