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Superb control … sensitive attunement … consummate care

Textura

One of the more curious musicological tidbits about Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 has to do with its re-emergence in popular music circles in 1976. That’s the year Eric Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” which borrows melodically from the symphony, reached number eleven on Billboard’s ‘Hot 100’ chart. …

The yearning melody Carmen adopted suffers no lessening of impact when delivered by Simon Callaghan and Hiro Takenouchi in their new four-hand arrangement of Rachmaninoff’s symphony. While many composers have created two-piano versions of their music, the Russian composer didn’t produce one for that particular work (especially surprising when he did create two-piano arrangements for his first and third symphonies), which incited the pianists to generate one themselves (for the record, a four-hand treatment of the second was created by Vladimir Wilschau in 1910). Premiered in 1908, the symphony comprises four fluid movements packaged into a compact hour-long presentation.

Rachmaninoff eases the listener into the opening “Largo – Allegro moderato” movement with shadowy, meditative gestures. Expanding from that kernel, the patterns multiply into an intricate embroidery as the music scales upwards and the haunting theme that will be intensively developed in the slow movement allusively emerges.

Like a faint echo, that theme is teased repeatedly as the music ebbs and flows, the pianists demonstrating superb control as they calibrate adjustments in pacing and dynamics.

Sensitive attunement to the movement’s arc is clearly demonstrated in their handling of the music’s incremental unfolding and execution of the climactic peak that arrives past the halfway mark. The two deliver the passage that follows gracefully, the theme again emerging to impose calm where there had been turbulence. In contrast to the first movement, the “Allegro molto” scherzo establishes a robust presence immediately with an opening ostinato that slyly references the haunting theme introduced earlier. The pace slows briefly before the music resumes an energetic and vigorous attack that remains largely in place for the remainder of the movement.

The tender theme declares itself at the outset of the slow movement and then branches into entwining patterns the pianists voice with consummate care.

While a sense of calm pervades the movement, tension is nevertheless present in the music’s repeated rise and fall and the rapture with which the melody’s voiced. The “Allegro vivace” finale decompresses from a rousing opening into an even-keeled presentation that sees the lyrical melody again emerging. Halfway through, however, the pace picks up, and the music barrels forth determinedly until it reaches its rollicking resolution.

One can’t help but be awed by the synchronicity with which the pianists execute the work’s passages, be they furiously driven or contemplative.

What Callaghan and Takenouchi have accomplished is, in a word, remarkable:

to translate the symphonic scope of the large-scale opening movement into a twenty-one-minute treatment for two pianos is alone impressive; that they extend that artfulness to the work in its entirety is all the more striking. To have distilled the textures of Rachmaninoff’s symphonic design into a pianistic form that’s as gripping is surely no small feat. It’s worth noting, however, the pianists’ statement that they aimed to “create a true piano work, rather than a less-than-satisfactory imitation of the orchestral version,” something, in other words, that holds up on its own terms and isn’t a mere facsimile of the original. Regardless, the lyrical expressiveness and dramatic sweep that are so fundamental to the symphony remain solidly in place in the pianists’ re-imagining, which they recorded at Wyastone Concert Hall in the UK during February 2022.

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To hear this in its piano version is to hear the work anew

Interlude, Maureen Buja

Excellent performances

MusicWeb International, Jonathan Woolf

A hugely enjoyable listen, played with infectious authority

The Arts Desk, Graham Rickson

Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi - Sterndale Bennett And Schumann
Hiroaki Takenouchi does the piece proud

British Music Society, Michael Round

Unwavering conviction and … constantly expressive musicality

Myron Silberstein, Fanfare

Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi - Sterndale Bennett And Schumann
Exhilarating playing here from pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi

The Guardian, Stephen Pritchard

Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi - Sterndale Bennett And Schumann
Takenouchi handles this with bravura ease and a warm, refined sound

Crossed Eyed Pianist, Fran Wilson

Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi - Sterndale Bennett And Schumann
Romantically affluent, poundingly sonorous and rich in pathos

MusicWeb International, Rob Barnett

Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi - Sterndale Bennett And Schumann
Broad expressive capacity…..superb technical abilities

Record Geijutsu, Shinnosuke Nagai

Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi - Sterndale Bennett And Schumann
Rich in tone and possessing an enviably secure technique – 5 Stars

Classical Ear, Andrew Achenbach

Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi - Sterndale Bennett And Schumann
Brilliantly played by Takenouchi

End Notes – The Quarterly Review, Stuart Millson

Confidence, conviction and tremendous panache

Em Marshall-Luck, Albion Magazine

Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi - Sterndale Bennett And Schumann
His playing is rich, dazzling and intelligently shaped

Sunday Times, Stephen Pettitt
Sterndale Bennett and Schumann – Hiroaki Takenouchi

Movingly Played

MusicWeb International, John France

“My major discovery on this CD was the only piece by a British composer – Ernest Walker’s heartbreakingly, beautiful Study (not a Prelude as given in the notes) for the left hand alone, op. 47 (1931). Better known for his seminal A History of Music in England, Walker was a composer, organist and pianist. The present work was one of three written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm during the First World War. The Study is deeply felt, largely exploiting the lower registers of the piano and demanding a good legato technique. It is movingly played here by Hiroaki Takenouchi.”

 

He is unfailingly convincing, his playing thoughtful, lyrical and spontaneous

The Sunday Times, Stephen Pettitt

A deeply felt reading

MusicWeb International, Ian Lace
Recording of the Month

A convincing advocate

American Record Guide, Don O’Connor

“The performances are excellent. Takenouchi’s skill and, as important, his belief in the music makes him a convincing advocate. Yates and the RNSO capably abet a worthy enterprise.”

Finely played

Gramophone, David Fanning

“Hiroaki Takenouchi […] is impeccable in his pianism and unfailing in his idiomatic grasp.”

“Once again finely played by Takenouchi, this too is a must-have for anyone interested in the post-history of the Romantic piano concerto. With decent orchestral support and recording, and excellent documentation, it all adds up to a more than welcome issue.”

Yates and Takenouchi revive Russian and British concertos

The modem rediscovery of Georgy Catoirc’s modestly proportioned oeuvre was kick-started by Marc-Andre Hamelin’s 1999 Hyperion recital (1/00- soon to reappear on Helios). Since then the chamber music has been quite well served, leaving just the songs and orchestral works in search of modern champions.

The Piano Concerto was composed in 1906-09, according to most catalogues, though its first performer, Alexander Goldenweiser, gave 1911 as the date of completion. Dutton do not claim theirs as a first-ever recording; though if Aima Zassimova’s lavish documentary study (Berlin, Verlag Emst Kuhn: 2011) is to be trusted, it would seem to be so. Like all Catoire’s instrumental works, the Concerto bears the mark of his close encounters with Tchaikovsky, Taneyev and Scriabin. Accomplished pianist and thoroughly trained composer that he was, the music always falls gratefully on the ear, though in terms of surprise, delight or individuality it lags far behind the likes of, say, Cesar Franck, whose Symphonic Variations loom large behind the 19-minute first movement. Any limitations in the music’s effect are surely no fault of Hiroaki Takenouchi, however, who is impeccable in his pianism and unfailing in his idiomatic grasp.

The adventurous spirit of this young Japanese-bom, London-based pianist also gives us the Second Concerto (1932-33) of Percy Sherwood (1866-1939), a German-born pianist-teacher-composer who settled in Hampstead at the onset of the First World War and whose manuscripts now reside in the Bodleian Library. This is music still solidly rooted in the 19th-century Germanic tradition, with some imposing Rachmaninovisms grafted on. Never less than accomplished, it is never much more than that either. Once again finely played by Takenouchi, this too is a must-have for anyone interested in the post-history of the Romantic piano concerto. With decent orchestral support and recording, and excellent documentation, it all adds up to a more than welcome issue.

Gracefully expressive

BBC Music Magazine, Michael Church

“For Takemitsu, walking through a garden was a quasi-musical experience, and that’s the feeling one gets from Les yeux clos II, the late work by him in this collection.  Debussy’s sound-world is his source, but he pursues the argument into mystical realms; Hiroaki Takenouchi delivers it with gracefully expressive economy, as he does the eight other piece he has chosen to reflect the pianistic tradition among Japanese composers schooled in the musical ways of the avant-garde West.

The other pieces which stand out here are Joji Yuasa’s exquisite Cosmos Haptic (‘relating to the sense of touch’), in which single notes and terse phrases are dropped like pebbles into a silent pool, and Sachiyo Tsurumi’s exuberant Toy 2 for piano and electronics, in which the piano’s timbre is decorated by gentle gurgles and burps.”

Performance  ★★★★
Recording  ★★★★

Takenouchi will go far

MusicWeb International, Mark Sealey

“This is a sumptuous, relaxed, languorous CD of nine spare – yet also explosive – Japanese contemporary pieces for piano.  It is as much an act of love as it is of exposition of new music.  The composers have been chosen by Hiroaki Takenouchi to represent work from that country of the last half century or so.  They reveal an intensity with – and, really, a sort of authority over – melody, texture, rhythm and what the instrument can do.  This intensity, this sense of command, can amaze, if we enter this sound-world as receptive listeners”

“a recital of real depth and interpretative strength […] here is beautiful, accomplished and truly delightful music.”

“Miyoshi’s and Nodaïra’s pieces are in contrast with what comes immediately before and with Hosokawa’s “Haiku”, which follows it, in that they have more pace, more evident animation.  The “Haiku” homage to Boulez shares some of the latter’s sound-world: clusters, vertical groupings, a love of sound for sound’s sake, sporadic interjections which serve to imply the melodic lines, rather than define them in linear fashion.  Here Takenouchi is at his poetic best.  Pauses, attacks, holding of notes – such techniques seem aimed at stretching the limits of pianism, without self-consciousness.  In fact they plunge us right into the essence of best practice and great creativity for the instrument.”

“This is emphatically and unashamedly modern, at times dissonant and aggressively uncompromising playing of honest, crystalline music.  Takenouchi (just 30 years old) is based in London, where he studied with the late Yonty Solomon.  He will go far.  His sureness of touch and dramatically clear and clean insight are ideally suited to this music and to the world it inhabits.  For something new, different, yet essentially full of integrity, beauty and creativity, this CD is well worth a look.”

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08/02/2025