helene grimaud

Documentary about the life and work of French pianist Helene Grimaud. She talks about her upbringing as a musician, studying at the Conservatoire de Paris, signed the first contract on the way to a stellar career, and, of course, based on her Wolf Conservation Center - a small reserve in the State of New York, which lived 17 wolves. The film features her many concert recordings.

This box set consists of 5 CDs of Helene Grimaud's beautiful piano playing. These CDs were originally released by Denon which has a great reputation for audio quality. Grimaud plays Rachmaninoff (Piano Concerto 2, Piano Sonata No.2 and others), Ravel (Piano Concerto in G major), Chopin (Ballade No. 1), Schumann (Piano Sonata No. 1 and Kreilserana), Liszt (Apres une lecture de Dante), Brahms (Piano Sonata Nos. 2 and 3 and Klavierstucke Op. 118).
A lot of great music beautifully played and recorded without breaking the bank.

Resonances can be identified. Echoes and pre-echoes, fascinating historical links that come together in Berg’s sonata. The Op. 1 of the Viennese master of atonality is nominally in B minor, but it already explores the very limits of tonality. It serves as the conceptual starting point and effective culmination of the musical journey that Helene Grimaud under­takes with her listeners. And all roads lead to the harmonic and thematic distillation that Schoenberg’s pupil achieved with this “apprentice piece” of his: Berg’s sonata concentrates in a single movement everything that constitutes a Classical sonata movement and does so, moreover, in the simplest manner imaginable.

The playing of the young pianist Hélène Grimaud has been described as “fire and ice, passion and reason all in one" (Le Monde de la Musique); “coiled energy eventuating in unbridled excitement" (New York Times);“superlative technique.. .she unfailingly delivers original inflected conceptions of the music" (Financial Times). But she is not only an extraordinary pianist - she is also an extraordinary woman, consumed by two loves in life: music and wolves. With her partner, photographer J. Henry Fair, she has founded a Wolf Conservation Centre at her home in South Salem, New York. Grimaud came to music because it was the last resort of her parents, university professors in the South of France. “I was so easily bored. I was a distraction in the classroom. They tried martial arts, they tried sports.

Helene Grimaud presents her first-ever Bach recording! Once again, charismatic Helene Grimaud presents an album with an individual concept. Bach vs. Bach Transcribed brings together original keyboard works by the master with works by Bach arranged (transcribed) for the piano by pianist-composers of later generations: Busoni, Liszt & Rachmaninov. This is the first time that Hélène Grimaud has recorded Bach - a challenge for any musician. The repertoire includes the famous Well-Tempered Clavier II and the Concerto no. 1 in D minor, the latter performed with Grimaud's regular collaborators, the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. Bach "Transcribed" features the Bach/Busoni version of the Chaconne in D minor, the Violin Partita in E major arranged for piano by Rachmaninov, and Liszt's version of the Prelude and Fugue in A minor. A landmark project in Grimaud's successful career, this recording is bound to be a best-seller.

This is the stuff from which magic is made: Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major, Op. 73--known as the "Emperor" Concerto, heroic and powerful--performed by one of our most distinctive pianists, Helene Grimaud. The excellent Staatskapelle Dresden is led by one of today's young stars on the podium, Vladimir Jurowski, a charismatic musical genius who was recently appointed London Philharmonic Orchestra's principal conductor. The chemistry between these musicians has the potential to create an extraordinary musical experience. On this album, the Concerto is coupled with a piano sonata out of Beethoven's late compositional phase where--noticeable in the slow movement of the concerto as well--the composer's concern for lyricism had deepened. Thus intimacy and delicacy are the features in the beautiful Piano Sonata No. 28, Op. 101 chosen by Grimaud. This project proves the modernity of Beethoven, firstly by the passionate interpretation of Grimaud and secondly by her being such an excellent communicator of her intentions and perceptions: "What makes Beethoven an extremely modern composer is this extreme vitality, the desire to never give up, and also this foreverendearing, extremely touching characteristic of the music to always strive to ascend, to really get beyond the frailties and the failures of the human condition by always looking up and trying to reconcile the top and the bottom, the vertical and the horizontal. That is still the struggle of people today--this is what makes Beethoven so timeless."