RAVEL PIANO WORKS

***** (Highest Qualification)
(Recommendation of the month) 
....Juan Jose Chuquisengo ELIGIO is probably one of the most profound paths existing outside the public music business...In the 80’s he met The legendary Sergiu Celibidache, whose explorations and insights about music impressed the young pianist so deeply that he retired almost completely from the concert stage for several years, and embarked upon the quest for new inner dimensions. He returned several years later to the public. This Ravel-CD allows one to hear how intensively he has reflected about sound and its genesis. Chuquisengo is an extraordinary musician, utmost sensible, attentive to every nuance, every sound and endowed with a formidable technique.
NEUE MUSIKZEITUNG
 
-------------------------

MUSIKWOCHE (1/03)
JJCH declined a great career in order to work under the guidance of renowned conductor Sergiu Celibidache in a search to transcend the limits of the merely subjective…here is a musician who orients himself towards the essential. It could have been enough for him to hold unto the unsurpassable seducing force of his sound refinement. Yet, with the addition of this new dimension, his performance of Ravel acquires a timeless quality where the idyllic and the possessed intersperse in an irresistible bond which transcends the ordinary, taking the listener on a magical voyage…An extraordinary recording of magnificent sound quality which lives between maximum fragility and
overpowering vehemence…a true shaman of music.

STUTTGARTER NACHRICHTEN (01/03)
 ‘HERE PLAYS THE INTUITION’
The recording he made for Sony Classical is of an almost painful purity – a stellar beautiful performance, a radiant reflection of heaven…We don’t exaggerate by stating that the there have been very few times Ravel has been taken so seriously, including the French piano school itself, when we listen to these musical explorations which fuse the clearest conception and the most overflowing ecstasy…Here, it is intuition that plays. Here we go beyond the merely subjective. Chuquisengo can actually let things ‘happen’, which is almost impossible for one who is not able to let music flow through oneself…He owns a contemplative fantasy and, it is necessary to say it, a phenomenal technique…Let’s put it very clearly; the world has been waiting for such a pianist, even though it still doesn’t know about him.

-----------------

Interpretation *****  (Highest Qualification)

…Chuquisengo met his great mentor Sergiu Celibidache in Munich, and he, how could it have been otherwise!, encouraged him to not let himself get stuck and become an idiot specialized in the piano but to further his studies of philosophy and relate everything, life, science, art…And it was worthy. Chuquisengo can not only play the piano in an astonishing way: his delivery of Ravel, besides a poetic gift and a captivating brilliance, possesses a spiritual dimension out of the ordinary…In his own arrangement for two hands of ‘La Valse’ he directs us towards summits so imposing and powerful it takes our breath away and makes us have a feeling of the final implosion’s shadow…An astonishing CD, recorded by an ‘outsider’ with regards to the musical scene, one who worked for years in anonymity to refine his art, while the man matured at the same time.
RONDO MAGAZINE