FonoForum - March/April 2011

Jerome Rose Plays Schubert Live in Concert DVD Review

"Last year Jerome Rose excited music lovers worldwide with live recordings on four DVDs, recorded at a small auditorium at Yamaha in New York. The simple visual presentation with occasional split screens and cross-fading is entirely focused on interpretation, so that the playing of the pianist is documented directly and without distracting side effects. The series that started off with works by Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt is now continued by the pianist with the four last Schubert Sonatas on the same high level and in the same modest, but by no means unappealing, setting. Rose’s Interpretations of Schubert are of formidable caliber, both in terms of mental penetration and competent technical handling. As in the last recordings, the pianist’s enormous concentration and artistic calmness is fascinating. True mastery, only scarcely found today, consists of the balance of architectonic awareness, creativity in sound, and seemingly spontaneous phrasing. Through this balance of artistry, Rose’s interpretations attain something timeless and exemplary. He is able to unite that peculiar change in Schubert’s music from painful longing to bittersweet solace into a strong unison, for example in the subtle cantilena in the second movement of the A Major Sonata. One hopes that the series of live recordings by this eminent artist will be continued."



PianoNews - March/April 2011


Jerome Rose Plays Schubert Live in Concert DVD Review

"These qualities of interpretation are by all means visible, because the cameras do not focus only in a stationary way on his fingers, but also observe him with slow zooms and soft angle changes. Sometimes, the direction is further loosened with images split into two or even four screens, making Jerome Rose’s fully matured interpretations a visual pleasure as well."


Clavier Companion - November/December 2010

Jerome Rose Plays Liszt Live in Concert DVD Review

"Steven Hall Jerome Rose Plays Liszt In the fourth of his Live in Concert DVD series, Jerome Rose performs Liszt's monumental Sonata in B minor, the Petrarch Sonnets, Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, Funérailles, and Vallée d'Obermann before an intimate audience at Yamaha Artist Services hall in New York. Rose brings to the stage an impressive and engaging technical display, captured in superb visual clarity in this four-camera, professionally produced DVD. The bonus features of the DVD include his equally satisfying 1975 BBC performances of Au bord d'une source, Orage, and Les Cloches de Genève."


Pianiste Magazine - March/April 2010

Jerome Rose Plays Liszt Live in Concert DVD Review

"The split-screen (the screen divided into many parts, up to four here) permits one to see a feature from many angles at one time, as in a Brian de Palma film, creating a form of suspense. But rest assured that the pianist survives at the end. The left hand of Jerome Rose is particularly powerful (Funérailles), the line in the right very flexible and he captivates from beginning to end in the Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude, a work often played with compunction that here is formidably living and radiant. The BBC archival images from the 70's let us see other playing that is much more external, with a winged virtuosity like Cziffra, in excerpts from the Années de Pèlerinage."


PianoNews Germany - November/December 2008

Jerome Rose Plays Beethoven Live in Concert DVD Review

"A concert is a concert. Quintessential for our judgement is, what, how and by whom we hear it. In a film, however, the visual presentation additionally guides our attention. Therefore, the Direction for the live concert Jerome Rose plays Beethoven Sonata" came up with something inventive.

The spatial variability of camera positions was very restricted in the small hall of Yamaha Artists Services in New York. In order not to stay in a dull atmosphere of bleak documentation, four standard perspectives – frontal, sideways from the pianist, as well as sideways and from above the stage - are used in fast, smooth cuts. That's why Jerome Rose appears quite relaxed while playing the Sonata Op. 101; his interpretation is guided by inner composure. Especially concerning the sound, the dissonances have, as in Sonata Op. 109, a clear function, and they are not retouched by him.

The optic presentation changes for the Adagio of the Sonata Op. 110 as the picture is cut into four simultaneous images. That way, one isn't drawn into the music so much, but rather has a certain distance to Jerome Rose's introverted emotional facets through the movement of one's eyes. Since such splitting of images is just one option of the camera direction and used often, the perception of Sonata Op. 111 with its dark appassionato becomes a more relaxed viewing pleasure.

So this production shows both Jerome Rose as a subtle Beethoven interpreter, and also a film concept by which the listening/viewing of piano music gets an aesthetic justification."

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