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Stefanovich/WDR SO/Chiacchiarini/Rundel(Winter & Winter)Tamara Stefanovich’s piano threads delicately through glittering orchestral textures in the concerto for left hand only, paired here with the jewel-like miniatures of Ten SinfoniasThe best known of the 20th-century piano concertos composed for the left hand only – works by Ravel, Prokofiev, Britten, Martinů and Janáček, among others – were commissioned by pianists who had lost the use of their right hand. But, as Hans Abrahamsen puts it, his Left, Alone, first performed in 2016, was not written for a pianist with only one hand, but by “a composer who can only play with one hand”. Abrahamsen was born with restricted use of his right hand, and, though he played the piano from childhood, that limitation gave him “an alternative focus on the whole piano literature”.His long-held idea of writing a left-hand concerto came to fruition in Left, Alone. Formally, it’s made up of a typical Abrahamsen sequence of short movements, six in all, which fall into two groups of three. The solo writing is largely melodic – there are few of the massive chords that Ravel conjures up in his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, for instance – as the piano threads its lonely way through the typically glittering orchestral textures, almost oblivious to what surrounds it. The result is both beguiling and mysterious, and, in this recording, quite thrilling; Tamara Stefanovich is a fabulously involved and involving soloist, making the recording by Alexandre Tharaud, for whom the work was written, seem almost detached. Continue reading...