Viardot: Songs
) | Label: TOCCATA CLASSICS Catalog: TOCC0303 Format: KANCHEVA ANGELOV TANEV KADER, INA KANCHEVAPauline Viardot (1821–1910) was one of the most extraordinary women in the history of music. Daughter of the Spanish tenor Manuel García and sister of the mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran, she studied piano with Liszt and counterpoint and harmony with Reicha, made her debut, also as a mezzo, at the age of sixteen and went on to inspire composers of the stature of Berlioz, Chopin, Gounod, Meyerbeer, Saint-Saëns, Schumann and Wagner, and she was no mean composer herself, as these passionate songs demonstrate. Twelve of them are arrangements of mazurkas by her good friend Frédéric Chopin the others set some major poems in Russian, a language she spoke fluently.  Price: $27.98 |