"• Recorded on four different organs, J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, 48 Préludes and Fugues equally divided into two books, is a veritable manifesto of the art of the keyboard and a founding work of all future keyboard literature. • Organist Frédéric Desenclos clearly reveals the architecture of these gems of imagination and compositional skill, originally composed for harpsichord. • Mr. Desenclos was a student of famed French organists Gaston Litaize and Andre Isoir. • Complete on 4 CD's; digibox."

The penultimate volume of our edition featuring organ works of the Northern German Baroque focuses on the complete organ works of Jakob Praetorius the Younger and Paul Siefert. Hieronymus Praetorius, the organist at the Church of St. James in Hamburg, is regarded as the most important founding figure in the field of independent Northern German organ artistry. Three of his four songs, Jakob, Johann, and MIchael who already in 1604 had contributed a quarter of the eighty-four cantional settings to the renowned Hamburger Melodeyen Gesangbuch, is said to have developed a special form of fingering and pedal technique making it possible for the organist to assume a very relaxed sitting position and corresponding to his serious, sober, personal disposition. According to the music critic Johann Mattheson, Praetorius's works were "mroe serious" and "more forcefully elaborated" than those of his friend Scheidemann.

Frederic Rzewski is most celebrated for his virtuosic variations for piano, The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (8.559360). The Four Pieces began as a sequel to that breath-taking work, but whilst sharing certain similarities – Andean dance rhythms and tremendous drama – it occupies its own very distinct sound world, offering a compound of intense lyricism, shattering darkness, and hints of revolutionary fervor. The Housewife’s Lament is a set of variations on an anon. 19th c. tune with strong influences of Beethoven. The punning title Hard Cuts refers to cuts both budgetary and musical, and Rzewski’s signature elements appear throughout: folk rhythms, pointillist clarity, minimalism, and unique craftsmanship.

Roman Statkowski (1859-1925) studied with Anton Rubinstein and Rimsky-Korsakov, later becoming a teacher and inspiring many leading Polish musicians of the 20th c. As a composer his taste was late-Romantic; his large piano music output excels, sparkling in the best tradition of Chopin. Statkowski gave up composition in 1904, devoting the rest of his life to teaching. Pianist Barbara Karaśkiewicz has toured and played across Europe and South America with a broad repertoire, championing rarely-heard composers. This is her fourth album and second recording of several of these pieces.

Classical Music

Chisholm, E.: Music for Piano, Vol. 3

"[A] glorious programme of petits motets for Lent, . . . [where] each piece is a tender, introspective contribution to the Passion story.

"Ensemble Pierre Robert’s resonant textures and skilful dramatic timing make these heartfelt performances spring to life . . . full of beautifully emotive polyphony.

"The Alpha label deserves its plaudits for enterprising repertoire, lavish attention to artwork, and beautifully recorded sound."

-- David Vickers, Gramophone

This is Volume 1 in Imogen Cooper’s new series on Chandos Records, dedicated to the complete works for piano by Robert Schumann. Recognised worldwide as a pianist of virtuosity and poetic poise, Imogen Cooper has established a reputation as one of the finest interpreters of the classical and romantic repertoire. She has dazzled audiences and orchestras throughout her distinguished career, bringing to the concert platform a unique musical understanding and lyrical quality.

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Classical Music

Renewed interest in outstanding Italian organ works of the 19th and 20thc. explains the decision to dedicate recordings to the work of Polibio Fumagalli, a prominent and prolific figure in 19th c. Italy and a link between the old and the new concept of organ construction and composition in Italy. An organ teacher at the Conservatory of Milan (among his students was Marco Enrico Bossi), Fumagalli succeeded in moving from the Italian opera style to the neoclassical, symphonic tendencies of the German and French style. Organist Fabio Re plays the monumental Valenza cathedral Serassi (1852) organ.

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Classical Music

- 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."

Iranian Composer Afshin Jaberi's Powerful Music Combines 19th Century Western Piano Traditions with Eastern Melodic Influences. It Is Strongly Connected with the Message of Equality and Peaceful Unity Promoted By His Religious Faith. The Bab Ballades Depict Dramatic Heroism and Tragic Sacrifice, While the Sonatas Express the Horrors of War and the Fragility of Remote Cultures, Out of Which New Hope and the Chance for Reconciliation Can Emerge. Art Was Always the Center of My Life; I Was Always Attracted to Beauty and Striving Towards Harmony; the Music in This Recording Was a Beginning of a Spiritual Journey, a Journey of Faith, Sacrifice, a Path of Life with Deep Emotional Affections... They Were My Remedy Facing the Hardships and Calamities and Challenges of My Life. - Afshin Jaberi.

Best known for his influential Klavierschule, Daniel Gottleib Turk's inventive and widely expressive sonatas, 48 in number, grew from the expressive potential of the genre shown by North German composers like C.P.E. Bach. The five instruments played by Michael Tsalka in this recording reflect the diversity of those instruments available in Turk's day, played with the nuances from the composer's own dynamic markings.

Tcherepnin: Piano Music, Vol. 5

Romanian classical pianist Clara Haskil (1895-1960) was particularly well known for her brilliant interpretations of classical and early romantic repertoire, especially that of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann. Haskil didn’t gain much acclaim until the late 1940s because of a series of physical ailments mixed with crippling stage fright. The songs on this release are all live recordings from Haskil’s concerts, taken between 1947 and 1956, during the peak of her career.

Grieg, E.: Piano Music for 4 Hands

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

• The piano sonatas of Haydn need no introduction. Russian pianist Daria Gloukhova is one of today's most exciting pianists. She infuses these works with an intensity and poetry that make these performances rise far beyond the norm.

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On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Primo Libro di Toccate (1615), Arcana is proud to make this reference recording of Girolamo Frescobaldi's most popular work available again. Here, Rinaldo Alessandrini shows to full advantage his well-known skills as keyboard virtuoso as well as his familiarity with the madrigal repertoire of the time, so important for a proper approach to this revolutionary book, whose basic elements are the affetti and where rhetoric became the interpretive key. Two period Italian instruments are used here, making it possible to rediscover the colors appropriate to Frescobaldi's music: a harpsichord attributed to

Last disc of the complete works for piano and piano and chamber music, this recording comes as the peak of a series which confirmed Eric Lesage as THE specialist of the Schumann repertoire. The harvest of outstanding reviews, for his recordings as much as for his very numerous concerts (several world tours), promises a brilliant future for this latest reference. This ultimate recording of the complete works for and with the piano by Schumann, the pure Saxon of the East, ends by the alpha and omega of his pianistic creation, such as glimpsed and heard in the West, in Rhineland. It thus opens on the Rhine, in Mannheim, with the charming Variations on the name 'Abegg" of 1830 and closes in Düsseldorf with the mysterious variations, called Geistervariationen, composed and copied out in February 1854, just before and right after his attempted suicide in the Rhine, leading to his permanent internment in Endenich (Bonn), facing the sacred river of the Germans...

Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturnes possess those grand melodic qualities that form the basis of the charm and seduction of his inspiration. These 1993 recordings find the pianist playing a Broadwood piano (c. 1845), a make Chopin himself played upon in England in 1848. The Flemish pianist Luc Devos (b. 1960) is regularly invited to perform in concert as a soloist with Belgian and foreign orchestras and has collaborated with such renowned artists as Arthur Grumiaux, Sigiswald Kuijken and Augustin Dumay.