This fourth volume in Nicholas Walker’s complete edition of Balakirev’s piano music is structured around his three Scherzos, which take us from the youthful influence of Chopin and Liszt in the First Scherzo, to the music of his prolific final decade, from which the Second Scherzo is one of his finest compositions. Balakirev’s interest in Spanish music was kindled by his mentor Glinka, creating surprisingly authentic sounding textures and rhythms, and the programme is topped with the elegantly masterful poetry of the two Valse-Caprices. Nicholas Walker studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Moscow Conservatoire. Winner of the first Newport International Piano competition, he has performed with major British orchestras, given recitals worldwide, and recorded for the BBC, BMG Arte Nova, ASV, Chandos and Danacord labels. He is also sought after as an imaginative and sensitive accompanist. Although his Beethoven performances have brought him special critical acclaim, and his performances of lyrical and late Romantic piano music have also been highly praised, he is best known for championing the neglected leader of ‘The Mighty Handful,’ Mili Alekseyevich Balakirev. In 2010 he organized the Balakirev Centenary concerts in London. He also teaches at the Royal Academy of Music.

ALEXANDER AFANASYEVICH SPENDIAROV (SPENDIARIAN) was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and a close friend of Glazunov who wrote that he was a 'musician with an impeccable, widely versatile technique'. Spendiarov's music combines Russian and Armenian elements and is saturated in folkloric influence - and he vitally enriched the expressive range of Armenian music as a composer, pedagogue and champion of his contemporaries. His piano works, both for solo instrument and for chamber forces, show the range of his gifts, not least his romances and lullabies, and range across his entire compositional life. Spendiarov's songs, heard here in piano transcriptions by Villy Sargsyan, perfectly preserve the unique timbres and textures of these works. MIKAEL AYRAPETYAN is a pianist, composer and producer. He is also the founder and artistic director of the music project Secrets of Armenia, which aims to increase international awareness of Armenian classical music, and actively organizes concerts featuring Armenian music in venues around the world, for which he is producer, artistic director and pianist. Born in 1984 in Yerevan, Armenia, he studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory, and continues to uphold the performing traditions of the Russian piano school, of which Konstantin Igumnov, Samuel Feinberg and Lev Oborin are luminaries. His repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the contemporary and includes rarely performed works by Armenian composers. His recording of Eduard Bagdasarian's piano and violin music [GP664] earned a five-star rating from International Piano, and his album of Haro Stepanian's 24 Preludes [GP760] was praised as a "discovery" by both Classica and Piano News.

Balakirev’s appreciation of other composers is reflected in transcriptions that also reveal his brilliance as a pianist. With several world premiere recordings, this programme includes the marvelous balalaika sonorities and virtuoso colors to be found in operas by Glinka, the novel concept of dovetailing preludes by Chopin, and the richness of Beethoven’s string quartets. A plaintive Gondola Song, the relentlessly energetic Tarantelle and Balakirev’s earliest surviving piano opus conclude this fifth volume in Nicholas Walker’s acclaimed complete edition of his piano works. Nicholas Walker studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Moscow Conservatoire. Winner of the first Newport International Piano competition, he has performed with major British orchestras, given recitals worldwide, and recorded for the BBC, BMG Arte Nova, ASV, Chandos and Danacord labels. He is also sought after as an imaginative and sensitive accompanist. In 2010 he organized the Balakirev Centenary concerts in London. He also teaches at the Royal Academy of Music.

In the years between 1902 and 1914 some of the world’s greatest pianists published a series of works that explored the lyricism and virtuosity of Paganini’s Caprices. Busoni was the greatest figure among them, but he considered Mark Hambourg to be the greatest pianistic talent of his generation. Both Michael Zadora and Ignaz Friedman carried out inventive free transcriptions while years later the Croatian Boris Papandopulo infused the pungent flavors of mid-twentieth-century idioms into the genre. “With a technique that makes you forget just how exacting these pieces are to play, Filipec not only generates the thrill of a live performance but does so with a disarming swagger and playfulness…” (Gramophone)

Norwegian composer Johan Kvandal absorbed the influences of mountain landscape, frequent travel and that of his father, the composer David Monrad Johansen, to develop what he himself called his “modern tonality”. He frequently fused elements of folk music with classical form to produce enduringly attractive scores in many guises, notably symphonic literature, songs and piano music, though he also pursued experimental forms in the String Quartet No.2 Johan Kvandal’s piano scores enshrine an ultra-fresh vitality that reflects the best of twentieth-century Norwegian music. He took inspiration from folk music but always in its purest form and never to provide it with an “art music alibi”. Synthesising national and international traditions ensured his innovative, very personal and approachable musical language.

Premiere recordings, with one exception, fill this Grand Piano release of music by the French jazz legend, pianist, conductor and composer Martial Solal. French pianist Eric Ferrand-N'Kaoua, (pronounced Enkawa) is the featured artist on all 21 tracks, the last a duo with thee composer. His eclectic repertoire allows him to blend Bach's Goldberg Variations, or the Berlioz-Liszt Symphonie fantastique with jazz-inspired pieces on the same concert program. Mr. Solal entrusted him with both the role of soloist in his concerto 'Echanges', and the recording of the works on this album.

Manolis Kalomiris is seen as the father of modern Greek music, his ideals shaped from the start by a desire to create a Greek national school, and his devotion to education reflected in the superbly crafted volumes For Greek Children written throughout his life. This is the first and only release of his complete solo piano music on CD. On Naxos there are two orchestral albums of works by Kalomiris in its Greek Classics series, the Third Symphony [8.557970] described as 'beautiful and powerfully gripping' by MusicWeb International, and another programme including orchestrations of the two piano Rhapsodies [8.572451].

The American pianist Yvar Mikhashoff commissioned 127 of the world's leading composers to write tangos for him. Between 1983 and 1991 he received an eclectic, stylistically varied range of works that offer a unique body of contemporary tango music for the piano. Tango's origin was in the waltz and mazurka but has long embraced jazz and even electronic music. In this unique collection the span is international and individual, ranging from traditional evocations to include the twelve-tone approach of Milton Babbitt, the minimalism of Tom Johnson, and the very personal voice of Michael Nyman. Having commenced her international career at the age of eleven, Hanna Shybayeva has transformed from being a 'child prodigy' to the mature and exciting musician she is today. Her playing has been praised by both the public and the press for her deep musical interpretations, captivating energy, a great sense of form and a rich colour palette. Devoted to music in every form, Hanna enjoys her solo performances as much as being a partner in both chamber and vocal music.

Jan Vaclav (Hugo) Vorisek, pupil of his important fellow Bohemian composer Vaclav Jan Tomasek, later studied in Vienna with Hummel and won renown as a virtuoso pianist. His compositions were admired by Beethoven, and he became a friend of Schubert. His short life witnessed a trajectory that took him from Classicism to the cusp of Romanticism, in which the currents of change are evident in his piano works. This second volume devoted to the music of Bohemian-born Jan Hugo Vorisek charts his rapid compositional development from the early Stammbuchblatt and Impromptu in B flat to the tone-painting of the Rondos, Op. 18. His early training with Vaclav Tomasek remained potent but so too did the new ethos of Beethoven. His character pieces share something of Schubert's harmonic ideas and suggest why Vorisek should be seen as a leading Viennese composer in the first quarter of the nineteenth-century.

This third and final volume dedicated to Enescu's piano works shows the unique blend of influences he acquired during his teenage years in Vienna and Paris. These start with his Brahms-like treatment of the piano as a symphonic instrument in the Scherzo and Ballade to the infusion of French late-Romanticism and Faure in the Impromptus. The crowning achievement of these early compositions is the Suite dans le style ancien, Enescu's first public solo piano opus, a stylised evocation of Bach seen through the prism of turn-of-the-century Paris.

Lubox Fiser was one of the most influential and versatile Czech composers of the twentieth century, with a prolific and impressive body of work for the stage, screen and concert hall. Fiser’s eight piano sonatas (of which the second is lost), were composed for the instrument described by the composer as ‘his greatest love of all.’ Retaining a special place in Fiser’s oeuvre, they became an intimate diary of his constantly evolving compositional style, from his student days and the neo-classical Sonata No. 1, through the experimental sonatas of the 1960s and 1970s, to the simplicity of melodic line and the immediate emotional impact of the final sonata, No. 8.

Esteemed as one of Germany's leading music critics, Ferdinand Pfohl never lost a passion for composition that had been nurtured in Leipzig. He wrote highly individual works for his own instrument, the piano, conceiving cycles that reveal harmonic daring and sophistication, often evocative of developments in impressionism. As Strandbilder ('Beach Pictures') shows, he mastered tonal painting- while in the compositional unity of Suite elegiaque, Bohemian and Russian elements mingle with the influence of one of his great heroes, Grieg. Artistic depth, technical superiority and a remarkable sense of tonal color are the trademarks of the young German pianist Jamina Gerl. She has studied under Roswitha Gediga, Eduard Zilberkant and Nikita Fitenko. A prizewinner at multiple piano competitions, she has performed in such prestigious venues as the Steinway Hall and Carnegie Hall in New York, the Tonhalle Dusseldorf, Nordstrom Recital Hall, and more.

- Tanya Ekanayaka is one of Sri Lanka's foremost pianists and an internationally acclaimed composer. - Her "deeply autobiographical" piano compositions, or reinventions, introduce a novel and hybrid musical genre that takes a wide variety of Sri Lankan melodies - ancient, folk and popular - and blends them with motifs inspired by the tonal centers of established classical compositions by Bach, Beethoven, Ravel and others. - "My music is my diary, through which I share and re-live specific moments of my life... each work in this album may also be seen as re-presenting my indigenous culture while seeking to highlight connectivity between the different works of a concert program in which the work might be incorporated."

This recording charts a two-decade period in the musical life of the eminent Dagestani composer, teacher and conductor, Murad Kazhlaev. He has always written with idiomatic flair for his own instrument, the piano, from the early Romantic Sonatina to the beautiful folk themes that make up the Dagestan Album. His nonchalant wit can be savoured in Picture Pieces whilst expressive beauty permeates the Six Preludes.

Raff: Piano Works, Vol. 4