News on the hifi front includes the realease from Deutsche Grammofon [Dorset] of a new recording of piano music by missing presumed disappeared Professor of Culinary Bio-ethics, Professor Brian Thrupiece. It is the company's first major release since the Contrik-69 pandemic and marks a return to its state-of-the-art Great Heaving audio-visual facility - thrupiecemediaCiTi.
Featuring a generous selection of the Professor's output for his own instrument* played by piano virtuoso Rabin Huperetic - Winner of the [delayed] 2019 Loloworth International Piano Competition's Golden Spike Award, it includes several world premiere recordings. Though Professor Thrupiece wrote the majority of his solo piano pieces early in his compositional career, two - the Grand Walz in A flat [Op894] and the Polonaise in A condominium [Op 926] - are mature works exhibiting the highest technical mastery and demanding an uncompromising technique from the soloist who is instructed to use arms and elbows as well as fingers and toes in the denser passages. As The Dorset Pianist Magazine [Spetember 2022] noted; "Two of the more mature works - recorded for the first time here - the Grand Walz in A flat [Op894] and the Polonaise in A condominium [Op 926] - are mature works exhibiting the highest technical mastery and demanding an uncompromising technique from the soloist who is instructed to use arms and elbows as well as fingers and toes in the denser passages.
* the Professor first learned the piano as a very young boy and was playing pieces by Alkan, Paderewski, Scriabin, Liszt, Thalberg, and Sorabje by the age of four. So prodigious was his technique that he took on much of the specialist repertoire for Piano Four-hands - which he insisted on playing solo. ["His hands and arms were a blur", Piddletrenthide Music Times August 1944.] He went on to master the kazoo, jew's/jaw's harp and the boogiejaphone as an adolescent and was once regarded as Dorset's prime exponent of salon-based "mouth music" [professorthrupiece.com is endebted to the editors of Threadbone's Dictionary of Music and Musicians for permission to reproduce these well-known public domain fact.]
In the earlier works, Rabin Huperetic comes into direct competition with Inbar Herupteci whose Grammy award winning recital also features the Op 149 Etudes [1943], the 12 Serious Pieces [Op 184] and the Preludes, Fugues and Riffs [Op 185], both from 1944. Dorset Gramophone Magazine critic Porter Mentow has written that despite the fierce perfection of the earlier recording "it is Huperetic who wins the palm with his sympathetic rubato, stunning arpeggios and complete identification with the idiom", adding, "rarely has an artist so enaged with a composer; it is almost as if they are one and the same person with only the name rearranged".
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