MARIO PRISUELOS PRESENTS HIS NEW CD "RICERCATA"

Edited by IBS, the CD brings together works by three great composers whose lives and works suffered the consequences of totalitarianism in the 20th century: Shostakovich, Ligeti and Stockhausen.

The pianist Mario Prisuelos wanted to bring together in his third CD entitled "Ricercata" three great works of pianism of the 20th century that, written over a 25-year interval, reflect the aesthetic changes of his time and were composed by three composers who suffered from The consequences of totalitarianisms are direct to their lives: Stalinism, Nazism or even both.

 

Initially praised by the Soviet authorities, the works of Dmitri Shoskatovich (1906-1975) from whom the CD collects his magnificent 24 Preludes op. 34, came to be reviled by the communist authorities as "decadent and reactionary". Such was the harassment and threats he suffered, that he used to sleep dressed and with a suitcase next to him, in case they came to arrest him in the middle of the night. His Preludes, performed by Mario Prisuelos, combine biting and naiveness, and some of them humorously adapt standardized forms such as the waltz or the fugue.

 

Another of the three protagonists of the CD, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) suffered another form of totalitarianism, Nazism, which marked his childhood and youth. Her mother, admitted to a psychiatric hospital, was a victim of the eugenics of the terrible Aktion T4, which was intended to end unproductive or deviant adults. His father was enlisted to fight on the front in the last months of the war, from which he did not return and the adolescent Kalheinz himself was forcibly recruited as a stretcher bearer, being a front line witness to the horrors of war. Mario Prisuelos interprets his Klavierstück IX on the CD, composed between 1953 and 1954, perhaps the best-known work of that monumental cycle that reflects the aesthetic ruptures of its author.

 

Both Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism marked the life of the Hungarian György Sándor Ligeti (1923. 2006) whose work Musica Ricercata gives the CD its title. While he was called up at the end of World War II, his parents and brother were deported to Auschwitz, and from there to other death camps, only his mother survived. After the Soviet occupation of Hungary and as a consequence of the repression of the insurrection of 1956, Ligetí fled to Vienna. His Musica Ricercata is a set of eleven pieces composed between 1951 and 1953, which captures the essence of Ligeti's quest to build his own style of composition and foreshadows many of the more radical directions that Ligeti would take in the future.

 

This CD is the second collaboration of Prisuelos with the IBS Classical label, after the recording of Tomás Marco's piano work. Previously Prisuelos had published for labels such as Verso and Universal, with whom he recorded “Adalid: the romantic piano”.