Piano Quintet Songs & Piano Quartet [CD]

Praised by BBC Music magazine for his 'lucid, velvety tenor and pop-star charisma', the Lebanese-American Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist. He joins the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective for this album of works by Reynaldo Hahn. The founder members Tom Poster and Elena Urioste write: 'Kaleidoscope has championed many unjustly neglected composers, but in the case of Reynaldo Hahn the neglect seems particularly puzzling to us. His music is immediately approachable, soaringly beautiful, and speaks directly to the heart; audiences, on the rare occasions that they get to hear it, seem to adore it. His life story is fascinating, too: born in Caracas, to a Jewish-German father and a Catholic-Venezuelan mother of Spanish / Basque origin, the handsome and urbane Hahn charmed high-society Paris, enjoying great success as composer, conductor, singer, writer-lecturer, and music critic. The Piano Quintet had been on our programming wish list for some time: it was lauded as Hahn's greatest work at it's 1922 premiere, and the powerful intensity of it's first two movements in particular acts as a firm rejoinder to those who criticised Hahn as a lightweight salon composer. By the time he finished his Piano Quartet, in 1946, Hahn was a man out of place in the world; this is music which bears no trace of modernism, instead looking back nostalgically to Hahn's heyday in la belle epoque. A number of years ago, our dear friend Karim Sulayman joined Tom in several performances of a set of Hahn songs, and a shared love for the music led to a discussion about how beautifully some of the piano parts could work in chamber arrangements. Karim had first discovered Hahn through the touching recordings on which the composer simultaneously sings and plays his own songs; and we, in turn, have always been deeply touched by the direct channel which Karim seems to have to Hahn's heartfelt expressive world. For all of us, it has been a profound joy to put these new song arrangements down on disc for the first time.'