According to Marek Toporowski, the French composer Hyacinthe Jadin (1776–1800) authored ‘the greatest masterpieces of the French literature for the fortepiano from the time of the Revolution.’ Despite dying in poverty from tuberculosis at the age of 25, Jadin accomplished much in his brief life, composing both orchestral and chamber music with a bias towards his own instrument, the piano. This includes concertos and the sonatas featured in this collection, which also offer an optional violin accompaniment. Although several published collections have not survived or been recovered, including a further 12 sonatas for the keyboard.

In a previous album on Brilliant Classics, Toporowski produced a definitive modern recording of Jadin’s Sonatas Opp. 4-6 (96958). In the present collection, he presents Opp. 1 and 3, along with Jadin’s trio of Op.1 string quartets in the composer’s own arrangement for piano and violin. Toporowski finds a pre-Romantic sensibility in this music, with tantalizing anticipations of Schubert, Weber, and even Mendelssohn in Jadin’s heightened language of expression, which ventures far beyond the conventional forms of his contemporaries.

An important point of reference for Jadin was nonetheless the music of Haydn. The Op.1 String Quartets, as played here in the composer’s transcription, are dedicated to Haydn and contain very obvious references to this composer’s style, particularly to his refined modulations. Jadin was also active in Paris while Jan Ladislav Dussek was living in the French capital. As a later co-creator of the London school of piano playing, Dussek seems also to have had a great influence on the young virtuoso. There are salient points of comparison between these sonatas, whether played solo on piano or with their optional violin part, and with the sonatas for the same forces written by Dussek and recently recorded for Brilliant Classics by Petra Somlai, Julia Huber, and Miriam Altmann.

Jadin’s music has never previously been documented in so comprehensive and stylish a manner as in this evolving series from Marek Toporowski, and the quartets receive their first recording in this arrangement, which will appeal to all collectors of Classical-era curios.

Franz Schubert's so-called "Arpeggione Sonata" owes its peculiar name to a long-forgotten string instrument that was usually referred to in Vienna in the 1820s as the "bowed guitar" or "guitar-violoncello". It was an invention of the Viennese instrument maker Georg Stauffer and was quite popular for about a decade. After that, it disappeared into the annals of history. If Schubert had not dedicated his famous sonata to the instrument, the arpeggione would have been long forgotten. But this way, the memory of the instrument was kept alive, albeit often in name only. On this album, we hear the intended instrument.

To complement the great "Arpeggione Sonata", soloist Lorenz Duftschmid has recorded five Schubert songs in instrumental versions (the poems in question are recited before the instrumental version in each case) as well as three nocturnes by an almost forgotten Romantic from the Rhineland: Friedrich Burgmüller. His "Trois Nocturnes", available in versions, sound most beautiful and full of emotion on arpeggione and guitar, the two instruments so closely related.

New recordings of signature works by a young and tragically short-lived lion of the keyboard in late 18th-century France. This is the most extensive set of records ever dedicated to the music of Hyacinthe Jadin, sure to attract the attention of all aficionados of keyboard rarities, especially as performed by the Polish harpsichordist and pianist Marek Toporowski, with his encyclopedic understanding of Baroque and early-Classical repertoire. Born in Versailles in 1776, Jadin grew up in a musical family and was educated in both the French and German traditions, something unusual at the time. His professional career was brief; he was appointed to the Conservatoire in 1795 as one of its first professors of piano, and fell ill from the tuberculosis that would take his life in 1800. Jadin’s surviving output includes six quartets, four piano concertos, and several violin sonatas. From the evidence of these nine piano sonatas – three for each published opus number – we may hear in Jadin an astonishingly gifted composer whose music foreshadows the Romantic era – even at points the expressive poignancy of Schubert. Writing in major keys, Jadin’s elegant facility belongs to his own Classical age; it is when he ventures into remote minortonalities, such as the F sharp minor Sonata Op.4 No.2, that he seems to look forward to another, more personal age of expression. In all cases, however, Jadin evidently took Haydn as a model, for his themes are unfailingly compact and elegantly conceived for the keyboard, his development sections are likewise concise while enlivened with touches of ingenious modulation between keys. In his booklet essay, introducing Jadin’s life and work, Marek Toporowski makes the case for the composer as a French-born Dussek, an outstandingly original figure and one of the great ‘might-have-beens’ of musical history. His stylish performances on a modern copy of a Walter fortepiano support such a claim, as well as affording much delight in their own right.