Par VAN NUETEN GUY. Light the fire, James. We'll take our digestive by the crackling of the hearth. Such were the thoughts that came to mind as I started listening to Guy Van Nueten's new record. Because, yes, there is a certain aristocracy to this music. There's the feeling of autumn and you immediately long to warm yourself on the sounds that issue from Van Nueten's bony fingers. But it could just as well be a car ride through soft rain at nightfall, where trees become freakish phantoms, and here and there a villa looms like a light beacon. Pacman is a record that makes you hunt for images, films you have seen before, feelings you have known and wish to relive, like a somewhat forbidden fruit, asecret pleasure. Melancholy? Absolutely. A vague sadness to make a person purr like a contented cat? Certainly. Yet at the same time, Van Nueten is cunning. While ensuring that his music pleases you, at the end of some compositions he'll suddenly come up with a theme that he'll stop abruptly, so that the notes remain hanging like snapshots of aerial acrobats in action. It is also investigative music as if Guy himself does not wish to know just where he will finish up. There is a stubbornness to it, an elegant fight perhaps between composer and pianist. It pursues you - exactly like a Pacman, in fact, chomping away at digital pieces of your heart. Yet it never seems to dissolve into thin air: time and again, right from the first listen, he makes you long to hear more. It is music that should protect a person like a secret, like an illegal fire in a forest that warms your hands and fills your head with dreams. It smells like cedar, this piano music. Or like a nice cigar offered to you by the imaginary James, who whispers: 'The fire is crackling, sir. Just as you like it.' At which point the enchantment begins all over again./ Répertoire / Piano

to the concerto for piano and orchestra in G Major Hob. XVIII:4. Par HAYDN FRANZ JOSEF. Improvised and also composed solo cadenzas, normally occuring towards the end of a bravura aria or an instrumental concerto movement, have existed since the late 16th century. They provide the performer with an opportunity for self-presentation in the form of a free style of playing or singing, based on themes and motifs from previous sections of the movement. Solo cadenzas are for the most part introduced by a six-four chord held by the orchestra; the soloist begins a protracting interpolation in free stlye, subsequently culminating on the dominant chord, usually with a trill. Whereas originally composers left solo cadenzas to be freely improvised, from the middle of the 19th century onwards they were frequently specifically written out. The increasing abuse of cadenzas as a mere display of free virtuosity, ignoring the style and impetus of the composition, played a substantial factor in this development. Thus Beethoven gives the soloist no opportunity whatsoever for free improvisation in his 5th piano concerto in which the cadenza becomes an integral, obligatory component of the complete work. In this unique series Schott Music presents cadenzas created for well-known instrumental concertos from the Classical and Romantic periods by major composers and soloists of our time. Nino Rota dedicated the 'Kadenzen zum Klavierkonzert Nr. 4 in G-Dur (Cadenzas of the Concerto No. 4 for Piano and Orchestra in G major) Hob. XVIII:4' by Joseph Haydn to Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920-1995), who recorded them for the label EMI./ Répertoire / Piano