"With this recording, the Luxembourg pianist Cathy Krier has risen to the level of the greats. With Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, she plunges the listener deep into the hallucinations and nightmares of Aloysius Bertrand, three of whose poems Ravel set to music. She achieves this with a relentless, suspense-generating calm in Le Gibet, with an incredibly finely differentiated musical embroidery in Ondine, and with a captivating intensity and virtuosity in Scarbo.
The Liszt transcriptions are of a similarly high standard. The performance of Gretchen am Spinnrad has just the feverish quality to reflect Gretchen’s amorous dreams, and the darkly rumbling tableau of Die Stadt is no less impressive, while the soul seems to float delicately away in Ständchen.
Konstantia Gourzi’s highly atmospheric composition Ithaka was commissioned by the Philharmonie Luxembourg. The piece explores the ten-year odyssey of Odysseus, who left Ithaca for the Trojan War and finally returned to his home island after numerous adventures. Traditional piano playing is juxtaposed with techniques in which the strings of the grand piano are made to resonate with superballs, singing bowls, and gemstones.
In Murmuration, Catherine Kontz describes flocks of birds moving in different formations in the sky just before their migration south. It is a tonally charming piece of about five minutes that transitions well into the hesitantly soaring waltz of Prokofiev’s Cinderella. In this suite, Cathy Krier fascinates with her exquisite and incredibly refined playing. This is ‘nouvelle cuisine pianistique’, as light as it is colorful, always less rather than more, and in this restraint a miracle of atmosphere and relaxation, also of pure beauty."
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