The new Joel Fan and Northwest Sinfonietta release, Dances for Piano and Orchestra, gets a rave from Classical Candor critic John J. Puccio:
“The soloist captures [Fantaisie-Ballet‘s] light, elegant moments nicely and then fills it out with a grand and exciting virtuosity… Fan again demonstrates his dexterity in playing with seemingly ten fingers on each hand. Yet [Vals Capricho] is also a surprisingly delicate piece of music, with a wonderfully lilting rhythm that Fan and the Sinfonietta express as perfectly as one could imagine… The fifth selection is Polonaise Brillante, a solo piano piece by German composer, conductor, pianist, and critic Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) and later orchestrated by Franz Liszt. Typical of Liszt, the piece is full of bravura showmanship and heroic landscapes, which Fan executes with an unerring command. … The penultimate number is the Grand Tarantelle by American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk… It’s dance tune swirls and whirls, with Fan hardly stopping to catch his breath. It’s quite a lot of fun. … As always with an album engineered by “Professor” Johnson, we get above all a realistic presentation…a lifelike ambiance, a truthful sense of orchestral depth and dimensionality, a pleasant hall resonance, a quick transient response, a broad frequency range (lows through the floor, highs shimmering endlessly), wide dynamics, strong impact, and plenty of air and space around the instruments.…The recording sounds most natural all the way around.” —John J. Puccio, Classical Candor