Previous albums on Piano Classics by Leonardo Pierdomenico have won enthusiastic praise from the international critics. Of his debut Liszt recital including the Csardas macabre (PCL10151), Fanfare noted: ‘scrupulous performances, featuring exceptional textural clarity and rhythmic resilience, coupled with an often striking attention to harmonic nuance.’ Gramophone awarded it Editor’s Choice: ‘His highly developed technique and cultivated sound, both adaptable to a variety of effects, are wedded to those twin essentials for artistic Liszt playing: imagination combined with thoroughgoing, scrupulous musicality.’ Such qualities illuminate his new recording of the Piano Concerto by Dvorák, made in the Czech Republic with an orchestra who live and breathe the composer’s music. One of his most neglected works, the Piano Concerto requires particularly devoted advocacy as well as formidable virtuosity to overcome the technical shortcomings of Dvorák’s piano writing, but the effort is rewarded with episodes of no less ardent lyricism than the high points of his concertos for violin and cello. The Piano Concerto, however, burns with a ferocity all its own, more similar in that regard to Schumann’s impassioned writing for soloist and orchestra. The unusual pairings draw on the talents of the Pardubice orchestra’s front desks, with two equally unfamiliar concertante miniatures by Dvorák, the Mazurek for violin and orchestra (dedicated to Pablo de Sarasate) and the Rondo for cello and orchestra intended for Hanus Wihan, who would in time inspire Dvorák to compose the Cello Concerto. Thus the album will complete a Dvorák concerto collection on CD as well as offering a further demonstration of Leonardo Pierdomenico’s artistry.
