Search - Slawik :: Weber: Piano Sonatas 2 & 3

"ALL THE VIRTUOSITY REQUIRED FOR WEBER'S INTRICATE WORKS, BUT WITH SENSITIVITY TOO: Reviewing one of Weber?s concerts in 1812, a critic emphasised that a key quality of his piano playing was not so much finger dexterity as a feeling for the instrument?s tonal subtleties. His piano music certainly requires virtuosity, and Mariaclara Monetti von Slawik is well in control of the brilliance and excitement...but the style of her playing shows that her real concerns are with fluency of line, variety of colour and especially with allowing the music great rhythmic freedom. Weber is known to have favoured tempo variation within a movement, and Slawik is very free with rubato. When it is done with her kind of sensitivity, this is very rewarding. The D minor sonata?s first movement is made to seem almost closer to variations than to a stronger formal structure, with a particularly beguiling dolce second subject; and this is taken further in the beautiful Andante, where her sense of line and colour is well attuned to Weber?s quite intricate textures (the recording, too, is attentive to these matters). None of this prevents her from making much of the grand statements that open the works. The Invitation to the Dance swings along nicely, with a charming lilt to the various waltz rhythms which Weber explores: they do indeed dance...her performances have a very sympathetic, even touching quality."-GRAMOPHONE Mariaclara Monetti von Slawik comes from a family of musicians and has gained international fame through her recordings of the complete solo works for piano by Luigi Dallapiccola, the complete works for piano by Giovanni Paisiello with the English Chamber Orchestra and the Mozart piano concertos K.466 and K.595 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Ivor Bolton. Her concert activities are impressive, for example with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestras RAI Milan and Naples, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the New Queen?s Hall Orchestra London.