Customer Reviews

Godowsky: Java Suite

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This album is a real find! The performer has almost everything needed to express this virtuosic yet impressionistic work; A brilliant technique, tonal clarity, sense of structure, and nuance. There is no unnecessary use of rubato.

Along with Ms. Luiza Borac and Jenny Lin, another promising young pianists, Ms. Budiardjo is the one we have to be concerned.

This CD contains the complete Jave Suite. A nice rendition, and a very welcome CD to funs of Godowsky. I hope it will encourage other music lovers to discover Godowsky's piano music, beyond his celebrated studies on the Chopin Etudes.

I will go out on a limb and say this is one of the most exquisite solo piano CDs ever produced. The instrument is in magnificent condition, and this pianist, new to me, is a consummate musician. Just listen to the way the ethereal distant bells steal in at the very opening. Godowsky's complicated, multi-layered music is interpreted with joyful abandon alternating with dreamlike episodes that are reminiscent of Debussy's Pagodes. This is a major piano work that is not often played because of the formidable difficulty, musically and technically. Here, this little known Java Suite sounds effortless, and makes absolutely wonderful "late night" listening. A "desert island" CD if ever there was one!

Like Turkish music in the 18th century, the Orient has beckoned classical composers with exotic melodies and rhythms, if not timbre or modes. Although the Dutch and English in the 19th century had trade outposts in Indonesia, the music of this island group did not make waves until impressionists Ravel and Debussy visited the world exhibition in Paris in 1889, where they heard a Javanese gamelan. Its influence, however, was limited until composers journeyed to Indonesia. The main contemporary proponents of this sound have been Lou Harrison and before him Colin McPhee, who stayed in Bali 1931 to 1939. As this present recording demonstrates, McPhee was following the footsteps of an earlier classical composer who came to Java in the mid 1920s. Godowsky, an immigrant to the United States from Poland, composed his Javanese Suite for piano in a romantic European style. At times the rhythms of Java appears, other times a theme, but the music mainly is impressionistic and atmospheric. The album also contains three very brief pieces by Alexandre Tansman, another Polish immigrant, that is somewhat closer to the Indonesian idiom. Performing these works exquisitely is Esther Budiardio, who happens to come from Java. Her soft, flowing and melodic "In the Kraton" contrasts with the bright and loud and percussive "A Court Pageant in Solo": she is convincing in both and the other sections of the suite. Thus, if you enjoy the miniatures of Debussy, you may want to consider this exellent album. [Other early composers who wrote Indonesia-influenced pieces are Paul Seelis (1876-1945) and Constant van de Wall (1871-1945).]