A new recording of Beethoven masterpieces by a Hungarian pianist acclaimed for her 'intelligence, technical finesse, and innate musicality' (Classics Today). As issued by Brilliant Classics in 2025, a 34CD box of music from Bach to Bartok demonstrated the impressive range of Klara Wurtz's musical affinities, in recordings which span over two decades. According to Rob Cowan in Gramophone, the box testified to a career of consistent excellence in the studio, 'her performances attentive to detail, sprightly and invariably at one with her chosen repertoire'. Such praise amplified the enthusiastic reception accorded to her long-pondered recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, made for Piano Classics, and which was given an Editor's Choice by Gramophone for it's 'selfless commitment and personality, bringing delicacy, drama and architectural splendour to this great music.' In her latest recording, Klara Wurtz turns to equally canonic repertoire by Beethoven: the Third Piano Concerto, the 'Pathetique' and 'Moonlight' Sonatas. This illuminating combination allows the listener to trace Beethoven's development in a concentrated span of three years on the cusp of the 19th century, and specifically through his special feeling for the tragic-heroic key of C minor, which reached it's most celebrated expression in the Fifth Symphony. The slow movement of the 'Pathetique' Sonata has achieved hardly less iconic status in the popular imagination. It's mood of inward contemplation transports the listener to a space inside the mind of the 28-year-old Beethoven, which the outer panels of the sonata further heighten with their high and noble drama. From three years later, the C sharp minor of the 'Moonlight' Sonata further intensifies those contrasts of serenity and struggle with it's sublime opening movement followed by a pair of intricate and fiendishly demanding movements. In 1800 - the year before the 'Moonlight' - Beethoven addressed the legacy of Mozart head-on in the Third Piano Concerto, which takes both it's key and the shape of it's opening motif from the earlier composer's Concerto K491. Klara Wurtz is given attentive and lively support by the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice under their experienced Armenian music director, Vahan Mardirossian.

Belgian composer Joseph Jongen (1873-1953) occupies an important place in early twentieth-century European music. Born in Liege, he demonstrated exceptional musical talent from a young age and studied at the Royal Conservatory of Liege, where he excelled in composition, organ, and piano. Jongen was deeply influenced by the French musical tradition, particularly the harmonic language of Cesar Franck, Gabriel Faure, and Claude Debussy, while retaining a distinctive personal voice. Jongen's piano works reveal a composer of remarkable craftsmanship and lyrical imagination. Rather than pursuing the dramatic intensity associated with late Romantic virtuosity, he favored elegance, clarity, and expressive subtlety. His music often combines flowing melodic lines with rich yet transparent harmonic textures, creating an atmosphere of warmth and sophistication. Impressionistic harmonic colors frequently appear, though they are balanced by classical formal structures and careful contrapuntal writing. Rhythmically, Jongen's piano compositions display flexibility and natural phrasing, avoiding excessive complexity while maintaining a refined sense of momentum. His writing is idiomatic for the instrument, demonstrating an intimate understanding of the piano's expressive possibilities without relying on technical display for it's own sake. Many of his works evoke poetic imagery through delicate textures, nuanced dynamics, and refined pedaling. Riccardo Mussato, born in Italy in 1998, graduated with highest honours in Piano Performance at the Conservatoire of Turin, where he also obtained a Master cum laude and special mention. After some masterclasses in France, he completed a Master at the Conservatoire Royal of Bruxelles with Distinction and he is ending a Master's degree program in Musicology at the University of Bologna. Particularly interested in French music, para-religious music, Italian music of 20th and 21st century, Mozart's opera, and Wagnerian drama, he maintains an active concert and outreach career, particularly through interdisciplinary lecture-recitals connecting music with the humanities.

An illuminating introduction to the musical riches of the wider Scriabin family, unrivalled in the catalogue, presenting many unfamiliar names and unknown pieces within the noble lineage of the Russian piano tradition. In a generous 85-minute survey, the pianist Matteo Cardelli presents piano music composed over a period of exactly 150 years by musicians who are all related (either by blood or by marriage) to Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). Scriabin took his first lessons at the piano with his mother, who had studied with the renowned pedagogue Theodor Leschetitzky at the conservatoire in St Petersburg. This chronologically ordered recital presents some of the striking pieces from his adolescence, including a pair of fugues and a more elaborate Fantasy in A minor, The most extensive piece on the album is the little-known 'Symphonic Allegro' which Scriabin wrote in 1896, possibly as the first movement of a never-completed symphony, and which Leonid Sabaneyev then transcribed (after the composer's death) as a Poeme en forme d'une sonate. Julian was the sixth of Scriabin's seven children, born in 1908 to his mistress Tatiana Shlotzer; Paul de Schlozer was Tatiana's uncle. Julian drowned in the Dnieper river at the age of just 11;the maturity of those few compositions he left is all the more remarkable: the Prelude Op.2 is the longest and most complex of them, alternating a hypnotic, suspended harmonic sequence with a tumultuous Presto, and thus evoking the same fantastical world created by his father in later compositions such as the Fifth Piano Sonata. Also born to Tatiana was Marina, the last of Scriabin's children, in 1911. Living until 1998, she composed this rigorously ordered, atonal set of theme and variations at some point in the 1940s. Daniel Lazarus was Scriabin's grandson, born to his fifth child Ariadna, and his set of Six Pieces reflect the turbulent era of their composition in the early 1920s, evoking styles from Schubert to Prokofiev. Robert Cornman married Ariadna's eldest daughter, Tatiana-Myriam; his Sonata brevis owes something to Copland. Their son - and thus Scriabin's great-grandson - is Julian Cornman, born in 1953, whose Rondeau adopts a neo-Baroque language with a sidelong glance at musical history. In this way, Matteo Cardelli takes the listener on a musical journey through the Scriabin, de Schloezer, Lazarus and Cornman families, from Romantic piano studies based on Liszt's models to the current postmodern era, through the complex and tragic history of the 20th century and up to the present day.

Born in Verona in 1998, Giovanni Bertolazzi won the silver medal at the 2021 Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest, previous editions of which launched the careers of piano legends such as Annie Fischer and Dino Ciani. He has already made an enthusiastically received Liszt albums, and has established his credentials as a Liszt interpreter of rare insight and prodigious technique. On this album, his Piano Classics debut, Bertolazzi presents some of the most technically demanding and yet expressively wide-ranging works in the composer's vast output. Every serious Lisztian has measured up to the Paganini Etudes in the past, and Bertolazzi now joins their number. Within the course of the intricately interlinked six etudes of the Paganini cycle, we move from the Bachian, arpeggiated flourishes of the opening Tremolo, to the witty and allusive gestures of 'Octaves', and then the notoriously hair-raising leaps of 'La Campanella'. In these works, sublime virtuosity is always placed at the service of imagination, visual and literary almost as much as strictly musical. By the time Liszt had come to revise his earlier, even more testing version of the Paganini Etudes, finalising them in 1851 in the form familiar to us today, he had produced several more 'Concert Etudes', and the profound melancholy which afflicted his later years had begun to show through in a piece such as 'Un sospiro'. Liszt virtually invented the tone-poem or tone-painting as a musical genre, whether on the canvases of piano or orchestra. In Waldesrauschen we hear the activity of the forest - the fluttering of foliage, chirping of birds and so on - but even more we are transported into the mind of one who feels the crunch of every branch underfoot, fulfilling Beethoven's claim for his Pastoral Symphony that it was 'more the expression of feeling than tone-painting'. In the lesser-known 'Grande etude de perfectionnement', titled 'Ab irato', we sense the depths of Liszt's religious feeling, and the full measure of a profoundly Romantic sense of the scale between man and God, between heaven and hell, all within less than three minutes. The dryly entitled 'Concert Etudes' of Liszt thus plunge the listener into remarkably contrasting inner worlds.

The Irish-born composer John Field is still celebrated today as 'the father of the nocturne' for his creation of a genre which went on to inspire Chopin and generations of Romantic-era composers for the piano. Field's own talents at the piano were recognised early, when the boy was just nine years old, and further nurtured by Muzio Clementi when the Italian-born, London-resident composer and publisher took him on as a pupil. Thus although the first three of Field's sonatas date from 1801, when he was still a teenager, they are the fruit of a decade-long devotion to the art and craft of music. Unpretentious in form and melodic profile, each of these two-movement sonatas opens with a sonata movement sounding near to Beethoven in one of his milder moods, though No.2 presents a theme which strikingly anticipates one of Schubert's late impromptus. The musing character of these movements is then answered by a toe-tapping minuet, as if to banish all care. While sharing the proportions of these Op.1 pieces, Sonata No.4 is a standalone work dating from 16 years later, once Field was installed in St Petersburg as a high-living pianist to the Imperial Court. The passing of time might account for the gentler nature and richer harmony of the Fourth Sonata's second movement. These neglected pieces only came to wider attention during the 1970s, when they were first recorded, and the discovery of them will still delight any collector of early-Romantic pianism. On this new recording, Tyler Hay prefaces each Sonata with a shorter piece demonstrating the range of Field's talents and expressive palette. There is the Rondo on Del Caro's Hornpipe; a Yearning Waltz; a set of Variations on a Russian Folksong; and finally a ruminative Andante inedit in E flat which, like the best of his work, looks forward to the era of Chopin and Schumann in asserting the stature of the pianist as a poet of the keyboard. "Tyler Hay has brilliantly mastered and assimilated these often elusive scores." Gramophone, July 2018 (on the piano works of John Ogdon, for Piano Classics)

New recordings of neglected but compelling piano works from the spring of Giuseppe Martucci's career. Martucci composed all the pieces on this album during the year 1876. As Ilaria Sinicropi observes in her booklet essay, Martucci was 'a composer in the making', in the first flush of his talent. In finding his own voice for instrumental composition, he looked naturally northwards, to the other side of the Alps, and in particular to Schumann and to Brahms, with their strong narrative arcs, their expansion of traditional models such as sonata form and their richly chromatic but disciplined harmony. The more adventurous language of the Capriccio e Serenata Op.57 was yet to come. Yet the first movement of the Piano Sonata - mysteriously neglected by pianists until now, with no other recordings in the current catalogue - already shows Martucci stretching his wings, and adapting the fantasy-style of Schumann to the ends of his own lyrical style. Sinicropi hears within it a powerful evocation of nature in the mould of Grieg's Lyric Pieces, and it prefigures the imposing intensity of expression in the third-movement Andante, with a scintillating Scherzo to serve as intermezzo and a Lisztian finale which synthesizes elements of chorale, fugue and rondo. The suite of Four Pieces Op.31 do not venture into the Sonata's ambitious terrain, cast by and large in a vein of gentle introspection, but they too reward close listening (which again is only now possible with Ilaria Sinicropi's recording). In fact the opening Nocturne is the most developed piece of the quartet, belying it's title with fiery outbursts and unexpected pauses. The following barcarolle and Romance may be heard as songs without words in a stylish emulation of Mendelssohn, before a final 'Dolce Ricardo's (Sweet Memory) returns to the tripartite but eventful form of the Nocturne. Finally, the Mazurka Op.35 makes a graceful encore, 'deeply rooted in the Italian tradition and the expressive style typical of mannerism,' according to Ilaria Sinicropi. Her affinity with this music is abundantly clear from her playing as well as her writing, and with this album she makes an auspicious debut on Piano Classics, which is sure to attract wider attention.

Vincenzo Maltempo's considerable catalogue of recordings for Piano Classics includes a much-admired set of the two concertos by Brahms. According to Fanfare, 'Maltempo... plays with commanding technique, grand gestural sweep throughout, and real tonal bloom.' For this second volume of the composer's solo output for the piano, Maltempo has devised a compelling journey for the listener, from the noble and often heroic profile of the Ballades Op. 10 to the late and distilled collections Opp. 116-119, taking in en route the Variations on an Original Theme Op. 21 No. 1 and the eight Klavierstücke Op. 76. In his performances, Maltempo brings out this stylistic evolution of both piano-writing and harmony, enabling us to appreciate for ourselves the degree to which Brahms continually challenged himself to enrich and experiment with his style, as well as ruthlessly exercising on himself the red pen and the sharp ear which made him so shrewd a critic of fellow composers. The scholar Denis Matthews identified three phases, or styles, in Brahms, not necessarily equating to the conventional division of early, middle, and late: the architectural, contrapuntal, and lyrical. On the surface, beyond a more intense chromaticism and openness to dissonance, there is relatively little to separate the Ballades from the late works. Much the least-often heard piece in this collection is the Variations Op. 21, and the teasing ingenuity of Brahms's treatment of his theme - initially quiet and introspective - is based on a rigorous exploration of contrapuntal possibilities. The Variations date from a period immediately after his fateful meeting with Robert and Clara Schumann in Dusseldorf, when he found himself stretched to live up to the Schumanns' extravagant praise of him as the pre-eminent successor to Beethoven. They and others were captivated by the composer's own mastery of his instrument as a performer, too, and the Op. 21 Variations show Brahms moving on from the extrovert keyboard lionism of works such as the First Concerto while still using the variation principle to celebrate virtuosity as both a composer and a pianist.

This valuable revival of the piano music by Cesar Cui began with a 2CD volume played by Marco Rapetti (PCL10211), surveying the composer's early output from 1877 to 1888. Born in what is now Vilnius, capital of modern-day Lithuania, Cui began to learn the piano as a child, initially from his elder sister. His first and last compositions were written for the piano, and he produced 29 opus numbers for the instrument (the total opus catalogue reaches 106). The Australian pianist Paul Rickard-Ford now moves the project on with a chronological survey from the Quatre Morceaux Op. 22 of 1883 to the Theme and Variations Op. 61, from 1901. Dedicated respectively to Theodore Leschitzky and to Josef Hofmann, these pieces show how admired Cui was in his day, even if he is now generally treated as the forgotten member of the 'Mighty Handful' group of Russian composers. One of Liszt's final works was a piano transcription of Cui's orchestral Tarantelle Op. 12. Other collections on the album are dedicated to Anton Rubinstein (the two Polonaises Op. 30) and to Hans von Bülow (three Impromptus Op. 35), as well as a charming pair of Bluettes Op. 29 dedicated to the Countess de Mercy-Argenteau, who was Cui's generous patron and indefatigable supporter outside Russia. Many of the pieces here are receiving their world-premiere recordings, such as the four pieces composed in 1900-01 and collected as Op. 60. They include a Polka, a Novelette, a Mazurka, and a Polonaise: all familiar genres, which Cui inflected with his individual brand of Russian-accented lyricism, ultimately drawing on an early-Romantic lexicon of expression formulated by Chopin and Schumann. Thus all the music here belongs to the salon, designed first and foremost to charm and to entertain. Paul Rickard-Ford has been on the staff of the Sydney Conservatorium for more than thirty years and was Chair of the Piano Unit from 2006 to 2016. His discography includes the Années de pèlerinage of Liszt, as well as recitals of Chopin and Schumann.

An illuminating juxtaposition of keyboard giants bookending the Romantic age, by a pianist with a growing international reputation. The Latvian pianist Georgijs Osokins made these recordings for Piano Classics between 2016 and 2018, and they attracted an enthusiastic critical response on their first issue. In Gramophone, Jeremy Nicholas welcomed a 'powerful and cleanly articulated reading' of Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Chopin, while the paired transcriptions 'provide further evidence of Osokins's stylistic identification with Rachmaninoff's idiom.' The Chopin album was made shortly after Osokins placed himself among the medal winners at the 2015 Chopin competition in Warsaw, where he divided opinion with interpretations which many found radical. Yet the coherence of his thinking is powerfully evident from the sequence which charts the 'late' thinking and keyboard writing of Chopin, as it ventures into poetic territories hitherto unexplored even by him, from the Third Piano Sonata through to the visionary Polonaise-Fantaisie. These are works that will perennially challenge and reward the most adventurous minds and musicians in any generation, and with this album Osokins placed himself among their number. In the following decade, Osokins has gone on to win first prize at the 2018 Manhattan International Music Competition in New York, and make an acclaimed debut at the Salzburg Festival, as well as several other recordings. He has also become the youngest-ever recipient of the Latvian Grand Music Award, the highest honour in the Latvian music industry. Such awards are recognition of the artistry which illuminates this album: a piercing musicianship which places itself at the service of the composer.

While Rodolfo Ritter's repertoire encompasses many well-known and unfamiliar composers, he has made a speciality of Ponce's piano music. He recorded the two piano concertos (for Sterling) in 2013, as well as several solo pieces. Now, for Piano Classics, he embarks on a new adventure, which should win new friends everywhere for an idiom full of charm and optimism, essentially Romantic in spirit and piquantly coloured by the composer's Mexican heritage. A social and cultural revolution followed on the heels of Mexico's political revolution of 1910-1917, as a once largely rural nation became, within a matter of years, predominantly urban. Born in 1882, Manuel Ponce in some ways embodied the outward-facing spirit of that revolution, as the country's first internationally renowned composer of European-style art music ('classical'), and yet in the nostalgia-soaked language of that music evoked a romanticized past. This is the tension explored by Rodolfo Ritter as he begins a multi-volume journey through Ponce's piano output - only the second pianist to do so on record. Ponce was something of a child prodigy, already accomplished and cultivated as both a pianist and composer before he entered the national conservatoire in 1901. Take the dance for the left hand titled Malgre tout, which Ponce was inspired to write in 1900 as a homage to the sculpture of the same name by Jesús F. Contreras - a resonant depiction of a chained and defenceless woman who, "despite everything", looks up with hope (not so oblique as a politically charged metaphor). Earlier still is the bel-canto style lyricism of the Misterio doloroso (1899). Another pivotal work for the left hand dates from a full quarter-century later, the Prelude and Fugue which Ponce wrote in Paris while under the tutelage of Paul Dukas. No less schooled by an earlier period of study in Europe, as a pupil of Martin Krause in Berlin, comes the Variations on a Theme by Handel (1906). In the interim, Ponce channelled this classical technique through the melodies and rhythms of his home country in pieces such as the Rapsodia Mexicana No. 1 of 1911. Volume 1 of Rodolfo Ritter's survey contains all these and many more exciting discoveries. As a Mexican pianist, teacher and scholar of German heritage, Rodolfo Ritter is ideally placed to guide us through such unfamiliar territory.

Principally surveying the Préludes and Images, the first two volumes of Alessandra Ammara's Debussy survey have attracted praise for their affinity with the composer's elusive but painterly idiom. According to Fanfare, "Ammara reveals her sensitivity to the Debussy sound world, rife with blurred outlines of objects and infiltrated with variegated light, in the manner of the painter J. M. W. Turner." For Volume 3, her focus turns principally to the set of 12 Études, which miraculously took shape over the course of just two months, in August and September 1915. Plagued by ill health following the diagnosis of rectal cancer in 1909, presented with the pressing need to increase his earnings through editing and performing, Debussy wrote the Études while staying in a town near Dieppe, on the Normandy coast. Emerging from a period of severe depression, he once more took inspiration from the sea in a sudden and final burst of creativity, which also saw the composition of the suite for two pianos, en blanc et noir, and the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. However, it is the 12 Études which have come both to define Debussy's late style - on the piano, as a counterpart to his ballet for Diaghilev, Jeux - and to present both a model and a challenge to later composers of piano études from Tansman to Ligeti. Debussy himself said that they were "a warning to pianists not to take up the musical profession unless they have remarkable hands". While the dry titles of the individual Études serve to conceal their rich and turbulent inner landscape, aspects of their invention are prefigured by the earlier works on Alessandra Ammara's album. The three movements of Estampes are as much "studies" in their way as the Études - of particular kinds of movement refracted through the images of a Japanese pagoda, a Spanish evening, and a garden in the rain. From 1904, and capturing the passion of his affair with Emma Bardac, L'isle joyeuse references both the island of Jersey and a painting by Watteau, but it also serves as a study in superimposed scales.

A super-budget introduction to the riches of the Spanish piano repertoire, including many critically acclaimed recordings. While Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, he spent the greater part of his career on the Iberian peninsula, and died in Madrid in 1757 as the composer of 555 keyboard sonatas which would, more than any other single body of work, bring Spanish idioms into the mainstream of European classical music. Many organists and keyboard composers preceded him, but few if any could match his spirit of caprice and restless invention as he fused Hispanic rhythms with the fairly new form of the keyboard sonata. Thus it is fitting that Scarlatti is the earliest composer on this 'Spanish Explorer' box. His music was soon taken up as a model by native composers of subsequent generations, such as Manuel Espona (1714-1779) and Antonio Soler (1729-1783), in writing quirky single-movement sonatas of unpredictably arching melodies and sometimes frenetic developments which evoke the spirit of native dances such as the fandango. While CD1 of this box is an imaginary 'opera for piano', staged by Jean-François Dichamp, the principle could be extended to the box as a whole. Dichamp's opera is arranged around the pillars of the monumental cycle of Goyescas by Enrique Granados (1867-1916). This cycle, along with the Iberia of Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909), then extended the reach of Spanish piano music and defined it's character in a late-Romantic world. While neither Albéniz nor Granados were modernists by temperament, it is tempting to speculate how they and their music would have developed but for their early deaths in the first years of the last century. Instead the creative flame was passed to Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) and Joaquín Turina (1882-1949) and while de Falla's original output for piano is relatively vestigial, it includes the astonishing Fantasia Baetica which invites comparison with contemporary piano masterpieces by Bartók and Prokofiev in it's new pouring of 'national' character into the virtuoso piano tradition. As the most recent composer in this Spanish Explorer box, Federico Mompou (1893-1987) is also the least definably 'Spanish' - not least because he was a Catalan born and bred. The music itself defies close analysis, much like that of his model Erik Satie, and yet it's aura of intense contemplation has proved deeply rewarding for countless pianists and listeners alike.

First recordings of Romantic-era piano miniatures by an overlooked figure among the "New Russian School" of composers known as "The Mighty Handful." "Irretrievably forgotten," wrote musicologist Richard Taruskin of César Cui (1835-1918). Long regarded as a dilettante, Cui combined a distinguished military career-as an engineer, expert in fortifications, and Moscow professor-with prolific writing as one of Russia's most formidable music critics. He was a crucial advocate for the nationalist ideals of Glinka and Mussorgsky, even as his own music revealed a more cosmopolitan voice, steeped in the lyricism of Chopin and Schumann. In this first volume of Cui's complete piano works, pianist Marco Rapetti presents music composed between 1877 and 1888, from the Trois morceaux, Op. 8, to the Trois mouvements de valse, Op. 41. The recording includes charming sets of mazurkas and serenades, as well as two major cycles: the Suite, Op. 21-dedicated to Franz Liszt-and the Pièces caractéristiques, Op. 40, dedicated to the Count and Countess de Mercy-Argenteau, tireless champions of Cui's music in Western Europe. Rapetti, acclaimed for his rediscovery of neglected Russian piano repertoire, has previously recorded Borodin and Lyadov for Brilliant Classics. His performances, described by Fanfare magazine as showing "perfect unanimity and a verve and élan that bring out all the vividness of the orchestral works," affirm his standing as a pianist uniquely suited to illuminate Cui's lyrical, poetic world.

World-premiere recordings of early works that shed new light on a foundational figure in Mexican classical music. Until recently, it was widely believed that Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) only began composing in his thirties-during the final decade of a life tragically cut short by alcoholism and pneumonia. By the age of 39, he had already secured his place as the most important Mexican composer of his generation, with orchestral masterpieces such as Sensemayá and La noche de los Mayos: works notably less indebted to European models than those of his elders and contemporaries, including Carlos Chávez. The rediscovery of these manuscripts, as recently as 2024, reveals that Revueltas had in fact been composing from his teenage years, and that he was an accomplished pianist as well as a violinist. This pioneering album presents 24 piano pieces, none exceeding four minutes except for a two-movement Sonatina, with the longest being a Lento doloroso. Most date from 1915, when Revueltas studied at the National Conservatoire, though later works stem from his years in Chicago (1919) and 1924, when he wrote his final piano piece, a Satie-like caprice titled Tragedia en forma de rábano (Tragedy in the Form of a Radish). Together, these works form a kind of musical diary, reflecting both the influence of his teachers, Manuel Ponce and Felipe Villanueva, and the emergence of a distinctly Mexican voice evolving between romanticism and modernism. Of Mexican and German heritage, pianist Rodolfo Ritter-professor at the Conservatoire in Mexico City-is a leading advocate for the music of his homeland. As performer, editor, and musicologist, he has premiered numerous works by Mexican composers while also performing the concerto repertoire from Chopin to Bartók. His combination of scholarship and artistry makes him the ideal interpreter to bring these long-forgotten piano works by Revueltas to international attention.

While the solo piano output of Dmitri Shostakovich is smaller than one might anticipate from a composer who was himself a gifted (albeit erratic) pianist, there is more to it than the monumental sequence of 24 preludes and fugues which he composed shortly after the Second World War for the pianist Tatiana Nikolaeva, and in emulation of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach. Indeed some of the composer's earliest surviving music is a set of Eight Preludes, Op.2, several of which were long presumed lost. Composed between 1919 and 1921, they demonstrate the teenage composer's grasp of pianistic idioms from Chopin to Scriabin as well as the melodic facility which, it would seem, was his native gift. Towards the other end of his career, another rarity: the contributions he made in 1957 for a portmanteau set of variations on a theme of Glinka commissioned from eight different composers. In complement to Shostakovich's Preludes, Fernanda Damiano presents a gentle Berceuse from the pen of the 16-year-old Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Conceived on a much more epic scale is the Second Piano Sonata which Weinberg wrote in 1942, the year before he first met Shostakovich and became in time one of his closest confidants. Dating from two years later, and thus still very much marked by conflict, is the sonata by Gyorgy Sviridov: a ferocious and too-rarely known work in one movement (but several sections) breathing the same combative air as the 'War' Sonatas by Prokofiev. By the side of these two sonatas, the Sonatina of Revol Bunin is relatively slight, but as the work of a fluent 15-year-old, it already shows signs of the talent which caught the ear of Shostakovich before long, when he took Bunin on as his only composition pupil at the time (between 1943 and 1945). Thus, although only Sviridov's Sonata was composed under the influence of the older composer, Damiano's recital presents a compelling sketch of mid-war and mid-century Soviet culture, through the prism of both the piano and of four gifted composers, each with their own distinctive voice. 'Fernanda Damiano plays. With intelligence, conviction and. #appreciation of the music's flavour.' (Fanfare review of Volume 1)

Hyung-Ki Joo is a pianist, composer, and musical entertainer. Born in England in 1973 to South Korean parents, he is a remarkable musician whose artistry spans piano performance, composition, and whimsical stagecraft. A graduate of the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Manhattan School of Music, Joo has studied under notable mentors and cultivated a deep versatility in both solo and chamber music forms. Collaborative ventures lie at the heart of Joo's approach. As one half of the celebrated musical comedy duo Igudesman & Joo-alongside violinist Aleksey Igudesman-he fuses top-tier classical performance with sharp humor and theatrical flair. But Joo is more than a performer-he's a champion for music's accessibility. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by world-class orchestras and soloists, and his music is published by reputable houses like Universal Edition and Modern Works. This new album contains original piano works by Hyung-Ki Joo: Childhood (an album of 10 pieces), Chandeliers, and Funk Yeah, for piano 4-hands. This recording also contain the Joo's arrangements of Billy Joel's Fantasies and Delusions, as well as Soliloquy Op.1. Played by Sun-Hee You. Born in South-Korea, she moved to Italy, graduating with honors from the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome. She continued her studies with the legendary Lazar Berman and Valentina Berman, and refined her artistry under the guidance of Bruno Canino, Oxana Yablonskaya, Boris Petrushansky, and Paul Badura-Skoda. She recorded for Piano Classics piano works by Kapustin.

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) was an Italian composer and pianist, widely admired for his melodic gift, refined craftsmanship, and versatility across genres. Although best known for his large output for guitar, his works for solo piano reveal a distinct and highly personal voice that bridges tradition and modernity. Castelnuovo-Tedesco studied composition with Ildebrando Pizzetti and was influenced both by his Italian heritage and by the French Impressionists, particularly Ravel and Debussy, whose colors and textures often echo in his keyboard writing. His style is influenced by Neo-Classicism, vivid, brilliant, with the occasional odd dissonance, strongly rhythmical and full of catchy melodies. He fled Anti-semitism before WWII and settled in Hollywood where he successfully composed film music for more than 200 films. Apart from his importance as a guitar composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco created a small but appealing oeuvre for piano solo. This new recording presents a selection of these evocative and tuneful works, which deserve to be played more often in the concert halls. Excellent performance by young Italian pianist Adriano Murgia. He has participated in masterclasses with internationally renowned pianists, including Aldo Ciccolini, Maurizio Baglini, Artur Pizarro, Boris Petrushansky, Boris Berman, and Roberto Prosseda, with whom he earned his Master's Degree in Piano Performance at the Venezze Conservatory in Rovigo.

A unique recital on record of complementary bagatelles and sonatas from two distinct periods in Beethoven's life, in a new recording by a modern master pianist. Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy is 'a storyteller', remarked Jeremy Nicholas in his Gramophone review of the Chopin sonatas on Piano Classics. He went on to praise 'nigh-on ideal' playing in the Second Sonata: 'unforced, rhythmically buoyant [and] texturally translucent'. The German pianist now illuminates four works of Beethoven with the same qualities. The Sonata Op.31 No.3 and Bagatelles Op.33 both date from what would prove to be a transitional point in Beethoven's career, around the year 1802, as he was stretching his wings and his capabilities. They achieve striking and often sudden contrasts of expression within both expansive sonata-form structures and the miniature sketch-form of the bagatelle, which Beethoven effectively invented from scratch with this set. 'Schmitt-Leonardy's superb technical and musical command holds unflagging interest' through the variation sets of Brahms, according to Jed Distler in another Gramophone review. Such command is a prerequisite for addressing the late masterpieces of Beethoven, so often recorded, and to which Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy brings his own, individual musical intelligence. Twenty years elapsed between those earlier pieces and the Sonata Op.110, during which time Beethoven's thinking inevitably underwent a sea-change. By this point he was striving ever more keenly to achieve the expression of transcendence in music, and the Sonata's ineffable opening phrase seems to distil that search into an unforgettable gesture. The Sonata is also marked by the composer's intensifying preoccupation with Baroque-era counterpoint, which gives the most haunting life to the finale's semi-autobiographical narrative of vitality lost and regained. The Bagatelles Op.126 are trifles in name only, contemporary with the Ninth Symphony, sharing the Olympian humour of it's Scherzo and the span of the Diabelli Variations. Each one captures a mood as intense as it is fleeting. They are perhaps comparable in this way with the sonatas of Scarlatti, such as those played by Schmitt-Leonardy on another Piano Classics album: 'one the most intelligently programmed and distinctively played Scarlatti collections to cross my reviewer's desk in years.' (Gramophone)

The latest volume in an ongoing series by an acclaimed Bach specialist on the modern piano. With recordings of the French Suites, Partitas and Goldberg Variations on Piano Classics, the Chinese pianist Yuan Sheng has placed himself among the most searching of present-day Bach pianists. As Jed Distler remarked in Gramophone, reviewing the Goldbergs, 'Yuan Sheng's disciplined, scrupulously terraced style often reflects his mentor Rosalyn Tureck.' In a new and illuminating booklet essay for this album, the musicologist and pianist Raymond Erickson remarks that the 15 two-part Inventions and the 15 three-part Sinfonias played an important role in Bach's teaching. These pieces, although today mainly associated with basic piano training, are not at all easy and in fact are sophisticated, small-scale masterpieces. 'They were not composed simply to provide technical training in keyboard playing but, perhaps more important, to teach keyboard players how to compose.' In 1720 Bach's oldest son Wilhelm Friedemann (1710-84) was already of an age appropriate for introducing him into the family trade of musician. So Bach started for him a music notebook: a Clavierbuchlein which included these Inventions and Sinfonias. Bach revised them shortly before moving to Leipzig in the spring of 1720, to take up his new post as Thomaskantor, and copied them out with a preface. In learning and playing these works, Bach affirmed, a diligent student would be taught 'a clear manner for playing not only in two voices but also in three obbligato parts and, furthermore, not only how to invent good musical ideas [inventiones] but also how to develop these well. And above all, how to achieve a cantabile manner of playing, and additionally to obtain a strong foretaste of Composition.' So it is that the Inventions and Sinfonias have given much pleasure to both performers and listeners throughout the subsequent two centuries. Brief as they are, each one of these 30 works elegantly outlines a distinct and often playful world of it's own. They reward intensive listening both on their own and in sequence. And Yuan Sheng's performances draw on all the coloristic possibilities and varieties of articulation available on the modern piano, without seeking to exceed the bounds of style which the works themselves inhabit.

'Only top-flight virtuosos need apply. Emanuele Delucchi is one of them... in a class of his own' (Gramophone). This is Delucchi's fourth album dedicated to the pianistic art of Leopold Godowsky. It's theme is counterpoint, and the possibilities of polyphony at the piano, which Godowsky expanded beyond previously conceived limitations. The album opens with Godowsky's magnificent transcription of the Sonata for Solo Violin BWV1001 by Bach. Counterbalancing the Sonata, the album closes with the serene Andante from the Solo Sonata BWV1003. In 1929, Godowsky composed his own Prelude and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H as one of a series of pieces for the left hand: a formidable demonstration of technical and compositional ingenuity. 'Imagine a real fugue in three voices,' he wrote to his friends, 'inversions, contractions, pedal points and all kind of devices on B-A-C-H for one hand!' Yet the Fugue itself is far from austere but rather upbeat in mood, no less a joyful celebration of the piano and it's possibilities than the rest of the works here. Godowsky based the first of his Symphonic Metamorphoses on themes of Johann Strauss on the Kunstlerleben waltz. This piece competes with his contrapuntal paraphrase on Weber's Invitation to the Dance (dedicated to Busoni, no less) as perhaps the most complex pieces ever written for the piano on dance themes. As on his previous Godowsky albums, all of them eliciting an enthusiastic critical reception, Delucchi has chosen to record these works on a piano from Godowsky's own time, lending both warm colours and a period flavour to his playing. He has chosen a Steinway piano from 1879 with a warm and poetic sound, well fitted to evoke the mood of fin-de-siecle Vienna, and to unfold the intricate polyphony of a piano genius. Delucchi also contributes his own, succinct and informed booklet essay on the history and context of these pieces.

A unique collection of both piano solo and concertante pieces by the Boulanger sisters, inspiringly brought to life by the Dutch pianist Duco Burgers. Despite her tragically early demise from tuberculosis in 1918, aged just 25, Lili Boulanger has become almost a household name in classical music during the last generation, through her slender but exquisitely crafted works for choral, orchestral and chamber forces above all, exemplified by her Psalm settings and her tone-poems such as D'un soir triste. Her music for solo piano is less well known, but still distinctive, as Duco Burgers persuasively demonstrates in these new recordings of the Prelude in D, the Trois Morceaux and the Theme and Variations. The Prelude is a work of her prodigious teenage years, while the Trois Morceaux belong to the happiest period in her short life, while she was staying at the Villa Medici in Rome, having won the prestigious Prix de Rome. The Fantaisie affords a fascinating window on to the aesthetic ambitions of the 25-year-old Nadia Boulanger as a creator in her own right, years before she became the renowned facilitator of others' creativity as a teacher of composition, theory and technique. The model of Franck's Symphonic Variations may be evident in the form and scale of the 20-minute work, dating from 1912, but Nadia presents her own, high contrasts of tragic nobility and free-flowing fantasy within the piece. Darker still is Vers une vie nouvelle, a solo piece from 1918, brooding and powerful out of all proportion to it's brevity. In his booklet essay, Duco Burgers weaves together commentary on the life and work of the sisters, entwined but distinct threads of energy, creativity and tragedy shaped by the world around them.

The piano dances: new recordings of ballet classics in sparkling keyboard arrangements. Born in Russia, living and working in Germany, Ekaterina Litvintseva has made a string of critically acclaimed recordings for Piano Classics, featuring the music of Chopin, Rachmaninoff and more. On her latest album, she turns to a trio of ballet scores which have always captivated audiences for the particular genius of their marriage between story and music. She opens with Prokofiev's own arrangement of 10 pieces from Romeo and Juliet, followed by Guido Agosti's arrangement of the Suite from Stravinsky's Firebird, and Mikhail Pletnev's virtuoso transcription of dances from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. As in any popular recital, there are three encores: a waltz from Delibes' Coppelia (arranged by Erno Dohnanyi), Les Sauvages by Rameau, and finally another foot-tapping dance from the French Baroque, extracted from an opera by Lully. In these transcriptions, the pianist becomes more than just a substitute for the orchestra; she takes the role of a storyteller and a conduit for the expression of the ballet. The reduction of forces brings a more intense focus on the melodic lines, the harmonic progressions and the rhythmic subtleties of the music. Prokofiev chose to recompose and distil the essence of pivotal moments in Romeo and Juliet rather than making straightforward arrangements. In their own ways, Agosti and Pletnev also demonstrate that the essence of ballet can be captured and reimagined in the hands of a skilled pianist. While their versions of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky have become crowd-pleasing pianistic tours de force in their own right, they also retain the elegance and the fundamental pulse of the original dances. 'The 30-something Ekaterina Litvintseva has been amassing a distinguished discography, and this... is a fine addition, exhibiting the combination of sensitivity and self-assurance that have marked her playing up until now... you owe it to yourself to make the acquaintance of Dora Pejacevic.' (Fanfare, reviewing PCL10226)

Konstantinos Destounis has made a speciality of Ravel’s piano works, playing them in concert on many occasions, including a two-night survey of the whole solo-piano output at the Conservatoire in Athens last November. He made this recording around the same time and captures the sense of music on the wing, still wet on the page from the pen of its fastidious creator. Born in Athens in 1991, Destounis studied in Thessaloniki and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg before taking his Master’s at the Royal College of Music in London. Springboard to his performing career has been winning many international piano competitions, most notably the Grand Prix Maria Callas in Athens, the Southern Highlands in Canberra and the Bremen European Piano Competition. On this album, his first major recording, he reveals himself to be a compelling interpreter of music which still sets a benchmark among pianists for technical finesse and musicianship. For Ravel, as for Beethoven and Stravinsky, the craft of composition was an essentially pianistic endeavour. While his image has become fixed in popular reception by masterpieces of orchestral colour such as Boléro, La valse, and Daphnis et Chloé, the composer regarded the processes of composition and orchestration as separate. He remarked to his student Vaughan Williams that ‘without a piano one cannot invent new harmonies’. Ravel paid tribute to his teacher Gabriel Fauré as ‘the origin of whatever pianistic innovation my works may be thought to contain’. All the same, the pianistic influence of Saint-Saëns makes its presence felt too, and Chabrier in the early pieces. Perhaps Ravel becomes more himself in each successive piece, from the Sérénade grotesque of 1892–93 through to Le tombeau de Couperin of 1914–17, but the process is one of refinement rather than radical transformation, taking in the darkly disturbing imagery of Gaspard de la nuit, which rapidly assumed totemic significance within the modern piano literature.

Classical Spanish sonatas in the mould of Scarlatti, infused with colour and drama by a native pianist. Born in Madrid in 1750, Manuel Blasco de Nebra died at the age of 34. He wrote around 170 keyboard works, only 30 of which survive. Some were published in his lifetime. Others are preserved in manuscript in the monasteries of Montserrat and La Encarnacion (Osuna), amounting to twenty-four sonatas and six pastorelas. The sonatas are all one- or two-movement works, quick pieces with or without a slow introduction. Pablo Piquero compares this music to innovative pop albums of our own time, 'albums that have taken a decisive step forwards, but which nobody has followed; albums with no sequels. Blasco breaks a new path in Spain, like Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Germany, but it has no continuity. He sets out as a precursor to the Sturm und Drang movement, a pre-Romantic, astonishingly original for his time.' Piquero made these recordings - the only complete survey of Blasco de Nebra's keyboard music in 2008-2010. They are reissued in a single set for the first time with the present issue, accompanied by an essay on the life and work of the composer by the scholar Roberto Montes. The pianist's efforts on behalf of Blasco de Nebra have elicited enthusiastic praise from international critics. The Melomano reviewer remarked: 'This young musician surpasses himself, not least in the bipartite form of each sonata, evoking a contrast between the meditative calm of the slow first movement and the gentle revelry of the second. Piquero caresses the piano with the same humility with which Manuel Blasco de Nebra imbued these intimate pieces, apparently ethereal in texture, fragile or delicate, yet well-constructed. He plays with intuitive and unpretentious subtlety, and conjures up, as if through a time-machine, the worlds of Mompou, Debussy, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven or Clementi.' - Manuel Blasco de Nebra was a Spanish composer and virtuoso pianist whose keyboard music remains a hidden gem of the Classical era. Born in Seville, Blasco de Nebra was deeply influenced by the rich musical heritage of Spain, blending it's lyrical and expressive traditions with the emerging classical styles of the late 18th century. His surviving piano works, though limited in number, show a combination of technical brilliance, harmonic sophistication, and emotional depth. These compositions, primarily intended for harpsichord or fortepiano, consist of sonatas and pastorellas. They are characterized by elegant melodic lines, intricate ornamentation, and an innovative use of texture that foreshadowed Romantic tendencies. - Blasco de Nebra's music often features sudden dynamic contrasts, suspensions, and a poignant lyrical quality, reflecting the influence of Domenico Scarlatti and the Spanish folk tradition. The Sonatas are especially notable for their emotional range, moving seamlessly between introspection and exuberance. Meanwhile, the Pastorellas, with their pastoral character and light-hearted charm, offer a glimpse into his ability to create vivid and evocative atmospheres. - Although he passed away tragically young, Blasco de Nebra's work provides a valuable bridge between the Baroque and Classical eras, with a distinctively Spanish flavor. - Played with intense concentration, eloquence and charm by Spanish pianist Pedro Piquero. Born in Seville in 1976, he received his musical training in Spain with Esteban Sanchez and in the United States with Caio Pagano. The pianist Maria João Pires invited him in in 2002 to reside in the Belgais Center for Arts in Portugal. He has won several awards and the following has been written of him: «Piquero exceeds himself... a glorious blend of Glenn Gould and Carlos Kleiber» (Melomano); «this is a genuine recording landmark... The very highest quality» (El Pais). Pedro Piquero is also a Soto Zen Buddhist monk, disciple of the Japanese Master Gudo Wafu Nishijima.

Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973) approached the piano with a sense of expressive freedom, avoiding the conventions of pure virtuosity and preferring a more intimate and reflective language. His piano pieces range from lyrical miniatures to more complex works, in which influences can be recognized from Italian early music to the modernity of Debussy, Casella, Stravinsky and Scriabin. Alessandro Riccardi has programmed a sequence of pieces written during the 1900s and 1910s. They evoke a creative laboratory, where harmonic experimentation and the search for new expressive forms intertwine with a deep respect for the past. From 1905, the 6 Morceaux represent the first expression of Malipiero's compositional personality, where modal influences intersect with late 19th-century trends. Published in 1910, the Tre danze antiche represent Malipiero the assiduous antiquarian, the reviver and transcriber of his 17th-century forebears such as Monteverdi and Gabrieli. The quartet of Preludi autunnali were composed in Venice in September 1914 and foreshadow a period of 'perpetual tragedy' in the composer's music caused by the outbreak of World War I. As Malipiero wrote in 1952: "Their melancholy is perhaps the effect of the war just begun and not yet felt." Those effects are further amplified in Maschere che passano from 1918, a 10-minute quintet of oblique sketches, presenting high contrasts: mysterious, violent, distant, Malipiero at his most late-Debussyan. In 1920 he then wrote a heartfelt homage to Debussy, followed by 'Three Homages', which undercut the solemnity of their title by being dedicated successively to a parrot, an elephant and 'an idiot'. Throughout the album, marking Alessandro Riccardi's debut on Piano Classics, the piano becomes an instrument for personal introspection and sonic exploration, while maintaining a strong connection to Italian tradition and, at the same time, looking into the future. - Gian Francesco Malipiero was an Italian composer whose piano works reflect his unique approach to musical expression, blending tradition and modernity. Known for rejecting the rigid structures of classical forms, Malipiero sought to evoke pure emotion and a sense of mystery in his music, often drawing on Italian folk traditions and Renaissance polyphony. His piano compositions are characterized by their lyrical qualities, rich textures, and distinctive harmonic language. - Malipiero's piano output includes several collections, each showing his innovative yet deeply Italian aesthetic. Among his notable works are the Preludi autunnali (Autumnal Preludes), a series of poetic and introspective pieces imbued with melancholic beauty. These works often feature modal harmonies and unexpected shifts in tonality, reflecting his quest to free music from the constraints of conventional Romanticism. - Other works on this new recording are the Maschere que passano, Omaggi, Six Morceaux, and 3 Danze Antiche. These pieces are deeply atmospheric, blending delicate, impressionistic passages with moments of stark drama. Malipiero's piano music often eschews virtuosic display in favor of expressive depth, demanding a nuanced and sensitive touch from the performer. - Alessandro Riccardi is one of the most remarkable young pianists of his generation. His CDs with works by Scriabin and Liszt received several 5-star reviews in the international press.