Valentina Lisitsa: Love Story – Piano Themes From Cinema’s Golden Age
The classical piano meets the silver screen in Love Story – Piano Themes From Cinema’s Golden Age – the recent album for Decca from Ukrainian born pianist Valentina Lisitsa. It’s a marked change in style for Lisitsa who started playing the piano aged 3 and used social media to launch her career.
Signed to Decca in 2012, the repertoire for her previous four albums for the label has included the music of the great Romantics – Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Rachmaninov, Beethoven and Scriabin. In Love Story, she takes the passion of these Romantics and translates it into swoon-worthy themes from the world of film.
Lisitsa adopts the persona of the platinum blonde femme fatale, and performs brilliantly with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Christopher Warren-Green and Gavin Sutherland, romancing her way through classically inspired piano themes that reach from the 1940s to the 1980s. Amongst them, two compositions by Richard Addinsell – the famed Warsaw Concerto from the movie Dangerous Moonlight and Invocation from Journey to Romance; Richard Rodney Bennett’s dizzying theme from Murder on the Orient Express, Nino Rota’s The Legend of the Glass Mountain, and other soundtracks by Shostakovich, Dave Grusin (New Hampshire Hornpipe from On Golden Pond) and Charles Williams (The Dream of Olwen).
The CD liner contains engaging notes by musicologist and composer Philip Lane which trace the classical origins of the selections.
Curl up on the couch, dim the lights and grab the pop-corn!
