English folk song/Raymond Lewenthal: Greensleeves

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Tax excluded|230 x 300 mm|8 pages
Transcribed by Kyohei Imaizumi
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Greensleeves is a well-known English folk song that has attracted renowned composers such as Busoni (adopted for his Elegie Nr.4: Turandot’s Frauengemach), Vaughn-Williams (for Fantasia on Greensleeves, extracted and evolved from his opera Sir John in Love), and Holst (for Suite for military band no.2). Lewenthal’s adaptation of Greensleeves demonstrates a gloomy rather than melancholic atmosphere. It is an appropriate piece for his album entitled “Moonlight and keyboard”, appearing along side works of Debussy, Beethoven, Liszt and Saint-Saëns/Godowsky, amongst others. Lewenthal’s predilection for dark was already apparent; later he came to be recognized as a Mephistophelean virtuoso who would wear a dark robe. The Westminster catalog has now been acquired by Deutsche Grammophon, where one can listen to the Greensleeves arrangement from the reissue of “The Liszt Legacy” whose impressive cover is appropriated from Lewenthal’s album “Toccatas for piano”.


Raymond Lewenthal (1923-1988) was an American pianist especially known for his contribution to the revival of the works of Charles-Valentin Alkan. Although he made his stunning debut in 1948 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Dimitri Mitropoulos, from 1953 to 1962 he withdrew from the public stage after he was assaulted by a gang in New York’s Central Park. His recordings by Westminster, a small independent American record company, were made during this period. Like his other labelmates, Egon Petri, Clara Haskil, and Paul Badura-Skoda, he presumably recorded in Europe where he had settled.

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Weight150 g
Dimensions30 × 23 × 0.1 mm