Two artists, separated by the pandemic, united through music.

Franz Liszt’s Consolations is a short cycle of six solo compositions for the piano. They provided the fulcrum of the superb violinist Maya Magub’s album of the same title.

G. F. Handel, Jules Massenet, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakoff, Charles Gounod, Fritz Kreisler, Samuel Dushkin, Robert Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn keep company in the lovely CRD label CD 3540, providing healing, consoling, inspiring music.

Maya Magub is accompanied by the fine pianist Hsin-I Huang, and given an intimate acoustical environment, in which the piano was separately recorded by Zach Dellinger. The violin was also separately recorded by Maya Magub and Alex Heffes, and both tracks were then mixed at The Tree House, Santa Monica, and mastered by mastered by Will Brown. These extraordinary measures, dictated by the isolation brought about by the pandemic of the past two years, did not conspire against the flawless ensemble work evident throughout the album.

Exquisitely produced and insightfully annotated, Consolations provides well over an hour of binge-inducing pièces d’occasion and salon selections every one of which rise above the level of simple ditties thanks to the elegantly unassuming and perfectly calibrated performance by two exceptional artists.

Rafael de Acha © 2022