Divine Art Records

Catalogue Connection: 50501

  • Sunday Times review of Diana Boyle’s Bach piano works

    [nb: this review was issued in relation to the original CD release on the pianists’ own label – no longer available]

    The playing of the British pianist Diana Boyle is quite a discovery. A pupil of Enrique Barenboim (Daniel’s father) and Artur Balsam, she has scarcely flaunted her talents, but they are very considerable indeed. This Brahms sequence comprises some of the most beguiling of the Opp 76 and 116-119 sets of late piano pieces, compiled with due regard for key change. Not one of her interpretations fails to arouse keen interest. She has evidently thought and about the music intensively but her playing never sounds didactic. On the contrary, it has magical freshness and clarity; a precision that is cool, yet full of feeling, perfectly attuned to the elusiveness of this music. Her phrasing, like her use of dynamics, is endlessly bold and fascinating. Often, and most notably in the andante con moto of Op. 76 No. 6, she allows daringly long pauses between the phrases and sections, thereby deepening the music’s mystery. No player or lover of the piano should overlook this disc.

  • CD Classico – Andrea Bedetti – 50501

    British pianist Diana Boyle is not well known in Italy but is considered one of the best pianists of old Albion. Her discography reveals that her activity is established definitely around the classical period given that her interpretative focus is on Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms – a line drawn from the base of tonal language, passing through the development of the Vienna School until reaching the composer who having drawn fully on Classicism closes the door of Romanticism to open the way for modernity – a pfor the artist who lives in seclusion in southern Portugal who conducts a coherent search, reflecting and meditating, in order to establish her artistic and aural approach. And so here the two recordings we are considering represent the alpha and omega of that narrative thread of repertoire, Bach’s Goldberg Variations and a miscellanea of Brahms’s piano works.
    [notes on Bach removed]
    In the Brahms recording, Diana Boyle has chosen excerpts from the Op. 76, 116, 117, 118 and 119 and in this case the recordings come from over twenty years ago (October 1994). The key feature of the English pianist’s approach is more evident instability which pushes the balance towards the Romantic rather than the Classical. Also here is a tone which uses the dynamic field to create a ‘mood’ (for example in Intermezzo in E flat minor, Op. 118 No. 6 and Intermezzo in B flat major, Op. 76 No. 4. Boyle uses this ‘instability’ to invest the works with a patina of pathos (seen most in the first two Intermezzi from Op. 117 and 119) and transforming them into a recipe of sound in which the lines of a past tradition from Mozart through Beethoven come through making her interpretation of these works less ‘heterodox’ than her playing of the Bach.

  • Diana Boyle – Brahms Piano Works

    Diana Boyle – Brahms Piano Works

    This album focuses on Intermezzi and Capriccios from Brahms’s very late period – Op. 76 and Op. 116-119. All of these pieces are true ‘Songs without Words’ though not titled as such, and are reserved, rather intimate works, never ‘flashy’ or virtuosic for the sake of virtuosity. They carry a strong sense of mood or inner feeling that mere titles could not convey.

    Diana Boyle is a fine pianist who records little but prepares each recording with years of thought, consideration and meditation on the music. Her interpretations are individual and thought-provoking, often delicate, not always conforming to the norm which pianists of lesser talent will follow, but looking to breathe new life and spirit into classic masterpieces.

    Like all of Boyle’s work this is a very carefully prepared and well crafted performance, an excellent addition to the library of recordings of this work.

    The second of our new digital-only ‘Intangible Classics’ series and of the Diana Boyle edition; these works by Brahms remain much less familiar to many than his Songs without Words and Hungarian Dances, but are pinnacles of the Romantic piano repertoire. Though recorded in 1994, this recording is as fresh as today and was previously on Integra Records (CD).