Strauss Transformed Nareh Arghamanyan

• Alfred Grünfeld (1852 - 1924): Soirée de Vienne, Op. 56:
• 1 Grünfeld: Soirée de Vienne, Op. 56 06:17
• Leopold Godowsky (1870 - 1938): Wein, Weib und Gesang:
• 2 Godowsky: Wein, Weib und Gesang 11:42
• Eduard Schütt (1856 - 1933): Konzertparaphrase über den Kuss-Walzer:
• 3 Schütt: Konzertparaphrase über den Kuss-Walzer 06:00
• Carl Tausig (1841 - 1871): Nachtfalter:
• 4 Tausig: Nachtfalter 07:08
• Alfred Grünfeld: Paraphrase über Walzermotive aus Aschenbrödel, op. 52:
• 5 Grünfeld: Paraphrase über Walzermotive aus Aschenbrödel, op. 52 07:34
• Otto Schulhof (1889 - 1958): Spieluhr-Polka, op. 9 Nr. 3:
• 6 Schulhof: Spieluhr-Polka, op. 9 Nr. 3 03:12
• Eduard Schütt: Konzertparaphrase über Rosen aus dem Süden:
• 7 Schütt: Konzertparaphrase über Rosen aus dem Süden 07:17
• Konzertparaphrase über Wiener Blut:
• 8 Schütt: Konzertparaphrase über Wiener Blut 06:19
• Ernst von Dohnanyi (1877 - 1960): Schatz-Walzer:
• 9 Dohnanyi: Schatz-Walzer 08:00
• Ignaz Friedmann (1882 - 1948): Carnaval de Vienne – Humoresque:
• 10 Friedmann: Carnaval de Vienne – Humoresque 07:13
• Moriz Rosenthal (1862 - 1946): Carnaval de Vienne – Humoresque:
• 11 Rosenthal: Carnaval de Vienne – Humoresque 06:48
• Total Runtime 01:17:30

Info for Strauss Transformed

Pianist Nareh Arghamanyan releases "Strauss Transformed": eleven ‘conversations’ between Johann Strauss II and pianist-composers who reworked his music for the concert stage.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Johann Strauss’s waltzes and theatre music provided material to the golden age of pianism to create a remarkable body of solo piano paraphrases. Pianists such as Alfred Grünfeld, Leopold Godowsky, Moriz Rosenthal, Ignaz Friedman, Ernst von Dohnányi, Carl Tausig, Eduard Schütt and Otto Schulhof built on original themes from Strauss II, reshaping them into their own language.

The album places these works side by side as individual responses to Strauss. The idea explores a period in which the distinction between pianist, interpreter and composer was less rigid than today.

Nareh Arghamanyan recorded the project in Vienna on a 280VC at the Bösendorfer Klaviermanufaktur. The choice of instrument and location was deliberate. The intention was to revive the intimate acoustic relationship between pianist, instrument and room of a Viennese salons around 1890.

Nareh Arghamanyan, piano

Nareh Arghamanyan
In her early twenties the Armenian pianist Nareh Arghamanyan, winner of the 2008 Montréal International Music Competition, belongs to the promising generation of today’s fine pianists.

Highlights in her 2011/12 season include her debuts with the Wiener Symphoniker and Xian Xhang, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Vasily Sinaisky performing Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt and Kazuki Yamada with Tchaikovsky piano concerto No.1, the NDR Sinfonieorchester Hamburg, the Orchestre Philhamornique de Strasbourg, the Wiener KammerOrchester with Mozart piano concerto No.17 KV 453 as well as the Malaysian Philharmonic. In recital she appears at prestigious venues such as the Tonhalle Zurich, the Berliner Philharmonie, the Musikverein Wien; other cities include Hannover, Friedrichshafen, Bremen, Basel and Innsbruck.

In the USA Nareh Arghamanyan has made an impressive New York debut at the Frick collection as well as at San Francisco Performances, resulting in a reinvitation to their “Young Master Series” in April 2012. She performs at the Boston Gardner Museum Concerts and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Orchestras she has performed with include the Vancouver Symphony with James Gaffigan, the Utah Symphony with Christian Arming and the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal with Keri-Lynn Wilson.

At the invitation of Mitsuko Uchida, Nareh Arghamanyan returns to the prestigious Marlboro Festival in summer 2011. She appears at Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and Davos Festival. She has played at many festivals internationally including the Tanglewood Festival, Festival de Lanaudière, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Colmar Festival.

In 2011 Nareh Arghamanyan signed an exclusive recording contract with the Dutch label Pentatone. The first disc (solo Rachmaninov) will be released in November 2011. Most recently, the Analekta label released her recording of the Rachmaninov 2nd Sonata and Liszt B minor Sonata to great acclaim. The Kulturspiegel wrote: “Arghamanyan takes on not one but two of the most difficult pieces in the piano repertoire for her debut-CD and wins. She dives into the notes with dazzling technique and artistic vision. The final movement of the Liszt-sonata has probably not been mastered so rapidly since Leon Fleisher. “

She has won an impressive number of awards: the 1st Prize at the 2007 Piano Campus International Competition in Pontoise and the 2nd Prize at the 2007 Jose Roca International Competition in Valencia. In 2005 she won the Josef Dichler Piano Competition in Vienna, and the following year was awarded a scholarship from the Herbert von Karajan Foundation.

Born in 1989 in Armenia, Nareh Arghamanyan began her piano studies at the age of five. Three years later, she entered the Tchaikovsky Music School for Talented Children in Yerevan, where she studied with Alexander Gurgenov. In 2004 she was the youngest student to be admitted to the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, where she studied with Heinz Medjimorec. Since October 2010 she continues her studies with Arie Vardi in Hannover.

Booklet for Strauss Transformed