Piano Solos by Earl Wild
earl wild, the American pianist of extraordinary talent, left a vast legacy of transcriptions, fantasies and paraphrases. He was also a masterful improviser, and many of these improvisations were written down and recorded to become part of his creative legacy.
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He was the son of a banker, the husband of Eleanor Roosevelt and the father of two children. He was a virtuoso pianist who performed in renowned recitals around the world. He was also a composer, arranging music for orchestra and choir and wrote numerous works of his own.
Wild forged links between high art and popular music, a fusion of Romantic and neo-Romantic styles that helped to develop the pianist-composer relationship into a new and innovative form. He was a master of the transcription genre, bringing to life piano versions of works by 19th-century exponents of the pianist-composer tradition including Liszt, Rachmaninov and Busoni.
Complete Piano Solos by Earl Wild
His career as a pianist, composer and arranger was one of great achievement. He toured the United States and Europe as pianist for Eleanor Roosevelt and was invited to play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Arturo Toscanini. He was a prolific and influential writer on musical history, published numerous books of essays and became one of the leading authorities on improvisation in the pianist-composer tradition.
A virtuoso of the Romantic school, he was also a great improviser and he wrote down many of his improvisations to leave a large collection of transcriptions, fantasies and paraphrases as well as original piano pieces. He was without doubt one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, a virtuoso of astonishing power, warmth and charm.
The first of these volumes contains a series of deeply affectionate transcriptions of poetic slow movements from Marcello to Faure, all transcribed with an intense sympathy for the piano’s subtleties and expression. Giovanni Doria Miglietta savours the music with the depth of feeling required, but he is not intimidated by the challenge of getting round all the notes in the score, and his playing is superbly captured here.
He is more reserved in ‘floods of spring’, which deliberately mirrors the piano idiom of Rachmaninov and he brings out the fuller texture in ‘The Little Island’. But he is no less eloquent with the more Impressionistic ‘Do not grieve’, which has a more lyrical and passionate profile in his hands.