Mary Warnecke
Mary Warnecke is an Adelaide pianist whose Tall Poppies recordings show heartfelt, intensely personal playing shaped by a lifetime’s thought at the keyboard.
Her Piano Recital (TP062), made in Sydney in 1994, pairs Schubert’s Four Impromptus, Op. 90 with Chopin nocturne and études and a Liszt group, in a programme reviewers praised for musical honesty, natural melodic flow and unforced brilliance.
On Kodály: Piano Music (TP104) she gathers almost all of that composer’s piano output—the Opp. 3 and 11 sets, the Debussy Méditation and the original piano Dances of Marosszék—played on the Stuart & Sons instrument at Newcastle Conservatorium. For years she has been among Australia’s most tenacious champions of this repertoire, bringing colour, space and rhapsodic fire to music still rarely heard in the concert hall.
Mary Warnecke is featured on the following titles
Kodály: Piano Music
This CD gathers almost all the piano music of Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály. Wisps of folk melody and doleful eastern European harmony colour these pieces, still rarely heard in the concert hall.
Piano Recital
In her sixties when this disc was made, Mary Warnecke had already been a force at the keyboard before marriage and children ended her performing career, as they so often did then. She returned with an intensely personal style.