The Performance and the Artist

To record the Chopin Études is the ultimate test of courage and technique in music. You will be compared to the few other great virtuosos in history who have risked their reputations on this lyrical, moving, and supremely demanding pillar of the classical repertoire.

Alessandro came to us in our first season, playing all of the Opus 25 Études, fittingly on Vladimir Horowitz’s piano. Along with George Li, who had just won the Silver Medal at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, the great Russian virtuoso Yevgeny Sudbin, and the legendary Nikolai Demidenko, who had also won the Tchaikovsky, we were exhilarated by meeting and hearing the probing young Italian virtuoso, Alessandro Deljavan, already a master, whose Chopin was so astonishing that we immediately asked him if we could record it.

You can hear t he result, both the Opus 10 and Opus 25 Études, on the Brilliant Classics album here, available on all streaming platforms and on CD. And on YouTube, here are the complete études.

Video of Alessandro performing the last three of the Opus 25 Études are on our YouTube channel here and Opus 10, Nos. 8–12 are available here.

Alessandro’s études match the brilliance of Horowitz, Cziffra, Argerich, and Hamelin while maintaining a rounded tone and a reflective awareness of the études’ structure and sheer musicality. They are limpid, poignant, fiery, and explosive in turn: Alessandro has all the voices.

Our chief recording engineer, Monte Nickles, worked closely with Alessandro using the Merging Technologies Pyramix digital audio workstation to produce what is a musically perfect and immense achievement.

Alessandro a lso recorded with us an album of Liszt pieces. The album is Liszt Deljavan on the Aeras Music Group label, also available on many streaming sites, such as Apple Music.

6 Alessandro

The four Mephisto Waltzes, along with the Valse-Impromptu and Sonata are in high resolution DXD on our Music Downloads site.

Liszt was fasci nated by Nikolaus Lenau’s version of the Faust legend, where the devil plays the fiddle in a village dance and waltzes away with the village beauty. Having just transcribed Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (Liszt dedicated his waltzes to Saint-Saëns), the concept of imitating a devilish violin on the piano was a suitable challenge for Liszt. His later versions of the first waltz were part of Liszt’s concept of the music of the future, and closer in a way to Schoenberg (as is the fugue in Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata).

Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor is one of the monuments of the Romantic repertoire, impossibly difficult, but also simple and lyrical in the middle. To have such a perfect performance of it in such high-quality sound makes it the perfect marriage of advanced technology and music history.

The Valse-Impromptu is a combination of Liszt’s diminished-seventh fingerplay inside the waltz melody. Out of Liszt’s trademark atonal jeu perlé introduction comes the concept of the disruption of divine harmonics by the devil and Liszt’s later more atonal pieces like the Csárdás (1881–84) and the 1885 Bagatelle without Tonality. Here Liszt was looking into an atonal future which would dominate the next century, along with world wars and the disintegration of the established social order. The chaos of the future was apparent to artists as the old century wound down, and discontent with the clichés and placebos of the past accumulated, even as crowds waltzed away the unease at a frenzied pace. The waltz thus became the symbol of its own undoing, Liszt’s anti-waltz. So, Liszt’s waltzes are filled with forward-looking cacophonies that undercut the traditional complacency of the waltz themes. These are not Chopin’s waltzes. They come from a more visionary ethos. Chopin was safely buffered by the ancien régime, while Liszt could hear the undertone of cannons.

Alessandro’s complete Liszt album is available on most streaming platforms as well as on CD.

Adding headphones and even a converter to your computer will allow you to hear Alessandro’s fingers on the keys, as if you were leaning on the piano during the recording session. Overtones and auras, spaces and emotions will emerge that are as close to being there as current technology allows. Alessandro brings out the pristine palette of a Steinway named Véra, 186 years after Chopin astonished the world with an entirely new musical vocabulary.

Like Demidenko, Alessandro studied with Dmitri Bashkirov in Russia, who said of him, “His playing is full of intensive power and contagious artistry.” Another teacher, the great Fou Ts’ong, the first Chinese pianist to achieve international recognition, said of him, “he is one of the most interesting pianists I’ve heard in my life.” The Dallas Morning News captured Alessandro in a phrase: “Jaw-dropping virtuosity and heart-stopping eloquence.”

—Tippet Rise co-founder, Peter Halstead