Geoffrey Douglas Madge plays Godowsky Vol. 3: Grand Sonata in e (1989)

CD-première van dit werk van de in Litouwen geboren Poolse Amerikaan, opgenomen op een 1926 Steinway 'D' Concert Grand. "Composed over 1910-1911, Godowsky's Sonata in E minor is, like the near-contemporary Dukas sonata (1901), d'Indy's sonata (1907), and the Rachmaninov sonatas (1907 and 1913), the flower of a ripe -- overripe -- era in which Faustian heroics gave way to confected nostalgia rife with angst. The proportions are vast, the bar-by-bar writing is more fastidiously involved, even, than late Brahms, while the tone is similarly intimate, autumnal, and confiding. It is also a compendium of Godowsky's art, with its harmonically liquescent and vaultingly impassioned ruminations set off by an Allegretto vivace e scherzando third movement of manically skittering elation, the fourth movement waltz (a fixture of Godowsky's world), and macabre forebodings in the final "Retrospect" movement -- grace and grotesquerie soaring hand-in-hand." (Adrian Corleonis, Allmusic)