Carreño Piano Music

"Scorching repertoire from a really great Pianist." Irving Wardle, The Times, London

"These pieces by Teresa Carreno have a tendancy to leap between extreme registers and Clara Rodriguez performs them with agility; leaving the listner quite possible thinking more than two hands are at the piano." Halenaka Bednar, London Net Classical

"The Venezuelan Teresa Carreno was, with Clara Schuman, the most celebrated female pianist of the 19th century. Most of these works are self-evidently morceaux for the salon, but superior specimens of the genre, requiring a pianism above the ordinary and showing a complete technical command. Clara Rodriguez is a sympathetic and enthusiastic interpreter; her touch is sure and agile. She invests all this highly agreeable music with vibrant life. This recording is superb." Pianist Magazine, Selected Discs, London

"Teresa Carreño (1853- 1917), nicknamed “The Valkyrie of the Piano”, had much in common with Martha Argerich: South American (Carreño hailed from Venezuela), charismatic, much married (Argerich has had three husbands, Carreño had four), and hailed as one of the greatest pianists of the day. But Argerich, as far as I know, does not compose. Carreño turns out to be rather good at it, a natural tunesmith of lyrical grace and, frequently, originality. If you can take a whole disc of Moszkowski or Gottschalk, whose protégé Carreño was, you will certainly enjoy this high-class salon music in (mainly) world premiere recordings. Though these two composers play a part in her music (Vals gayo has a Gottschalkian Latin-American lilt, Une revue á Prague uses some configurations at the top of the keyboard borrowed from Louis Moreau, while her Intermezzo is a close relation of Moszkowski’s La jongleuse), Carreño is very much her own woman: try the extended Ballade (7'22"), the two touching Elegies, Un rêve en mer and Le sommeil de l’enfant. The first subject of Un bal en rêve seems to be a prescient version of “Happy birthday to you”, while Kleiner Waltzer (tr 11), her once-popular and most celebrated composition, was recorded by one of her husbands, Eugen d’Albert (Carreño herself made a piano roll of it). Such music needs an empathetic spirit to show it to its best advantage and Clara Rodriguez, Venezuelan herself, provides it with performances of alluring vivacity allied to that most essential of requisites in this type of repertoire – charm. Highly recommended." Jeremy Nicholas, Gramophone Magazine on NI6103 Clara Rodriguez plays Teresa Carreño

“The present recording continues the expression of respect and admiration towards Carreño's musical legacy. In this reviewr's opinion, playing her music is the best honour that Carreño can receive because it demonstrates her enduring legacy as an outstanding composer. Clara Rodriguez has distinguished herself of being a first-class promoter of the piano repertoire by Latin American composers, especially those from Venezuela from the nineteenth to the twentieth-first century,in international concert venues. It is thus no surprise she has decided to record music by Teresa Carreño, a composer she came to know during her earlier music studies in Caracas.” Hermann Hudde, Cambridge University Press 2013 Clara Rodríguez Plays the Music of Teresa Carreño