Filled with well known Irish and Scottish melodies set for virtuoso piano and performed by the highly regarded Australian pianist Rosemary Tuck, The Meeting of the Waters, Celtic Fantasies for Piano, is a celebration of the work of William Vincent Wallace, a talented musician from Waterford, Ireland, who is widely recognized as the first great instrumentalist ever to visit Australia.
William Vincent Wallace was a gifted and controversial performer and composer who left an indelible mark on the many cities around the world in which he lived and to which he travelled.
Review:
"The composer here is not the Scottish William Wallace (1860-1940) nor yet the American William Wallace (1933- ), but an earlier, lesser well known William Wallace who composed much excellent, heart captivating music that sadly has been neglected. It is good to see that Cala has grasped the initiative to bring out this CD of unknown fantasies....
The recording is first class and the spacious ambience of the Waterford City Hall is superb....The top notes are captured with a pure and bell-like quality that brings supreme elegance to the music. (We are not told the make of the piano.) Rosemary Tuck's performance throughout is very good and provides us with an excellent archive of these forgotten works."
Raymond Walker - Musicweb, August 2002 (internet)
"To all these challenges and more the talented Rosemary Tuck is fully equipped. She relishes the demands, and is stylistically apt and full of colour, vivacity and lyricism. How appropriate that in a pleasing acoustic in the Large Room at City Hall one of Waterford's most quixotic, far travelled, and talented sons has come home at last".
Jonathan Woolf - Musicweb, September 2002 (internet)
"Her splendid performance of thse Celtic Fantasies demonstrate the composer's pianistic virtuosity and in so doing reveal something of a debt to Mendelssohn and possibly Schumann and Chopin, weaving styistically predictable yet impressive variations around familiar Irish tunes." www.mvdaily.com, July 2003
"Get the CD and enjoy the long seven minute track "Robin Adair" based on Eileen Aroon air and experience Tuck's style and Wallace's virtuosity as an arranger/composer". The Munster Express, Ireland, June 2002
Biography:
Pianist Rosemary Tuck was born in Sydney and studied with John Winther in Canberra, before pursuing advanced studies with Walter Hautzig at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and Andrzej Esterhazy, a pupil of Neuhaus in Moscow. She represented Australia in a series of recitals in the United States under the auspices of the American-Australian Bicentennial Foundation, including a recital at Carnegie Hall. She has given recitals in the Sydney Opera House, at the South Bank Centre in London and St John's Smith Square. She appeared at the Aarhus Festival in Denmark in the presence of Queen Margrethe II.
In 2001 she gave the first official performance in the new William Vincent Wallace Millennium Plaza in Waterford, Ireland. Her recordings include piano music by Liadov and Ketelbey.
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