The idea to make this recording took Enrico Fagnoni back to his childhood, and his first musical experiences of the US. He left Italy with scores of Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Rachmaninov, but found himself listening to the best jazz and ragtime musicians. He was astonished by the rhythm of their music, the acoustics of the clubs and the spontaneity of their jam sessions. He offers this new recording of the Songbook as a tribute to Gershwin’s genius. Gershwin compiled the Songbook in the early 1930s at the invitation of his publisher, selecting his favorite 18 among the hundreds of songs he had composed up to that point and producing piano-only transcriptions which bear the mark of his pianistic heritage and education in both classical and popular spheres, from Rachmaninoff to Zac Confrey. Jazz, ragtime, and klezmer all inflect these songs with their own unique harmonies, but ever since their composition they have transcended national and cultural boundaries to win the hearts of anyone who appreciates a melody, whether jaunty or melancholy or erotic. While playing these pieces, Enrico Fagnoni conceived the wish to make his own arrangements of the songs in the Songbook. These are placed on this new album after the ‘straight’ Songbook, as a unique complement. Fagnoni’s take is often quite different in character, and ventures far from the composer’s original transcriptions, while staying faithful to his superb melodies.

This album marks Enrico Fagnoni’s debut on Piano Classics, but he has been a much-sought-after pianist in Italy for many years, performing both in concert and on TV, winning the admiration of Nino Rota and playing the full spectrum of pianistic repertoire from classics to jazz and beyond.

Though Dutilleux began composing at an early age and undertook the rigorous course of study at the Paris Conservatoire, culminating in the much sought-after Prix de Rome in 1938 with a cantata, he regarded his Piano Sonata of 1946-8 as an Opus 1. This attitude was characteristic of a remarkably fastidious and self-critical composer who dedicated his life to composition –and the nurturing of young composers –and yet whose published output is influential out of all proportion to its size. He wrote the sonata for the pianist Geneviève Joy whom he married in 1946. The musical language is as much modal as tonal, owing as much to Bartók’s methods of musical organization and the 19th-century Germanic concept of the large-scale masterpiece as contemporary developments in harmony. Everything he wrote seems to repudiate the commonly held idea that French music is essentially frivolous and charming, but Dutilleux’s music can smile and relax, too: while working at French radio he composed a series of short pastiche pieces as air-filler, later compiling them as a suite, Au gré des ondes. Blackbird is Dutilleux’s sole trespass on the territory of his contemporary Messiaen: knowingly brief and non-naturalistic by comparison, a portrait of the blackbird’s soul more than its song. The Debussian heritage of painting on the piano comes to the fore on the set of Three Preludes composed between 1973 and 1988, while Resonances is a study in timbre built with the composer’s individual technique of pivot notes and chords. As Vittoria Quartararo observes in her booklet introduction, ‘the music of Dutilleux often seems to shift towards a visual level. While the verticality of piano chords can resonate like light does on a black canvas, one’s gaze becomes more horizontal, distant, and at times visionary, detecting the reverberation of a sound transformed in liquid crystal.’

This marks the CD premiere of the piano transcription of the Franck violin sonata by Alfred Cortot - with new pianistic textures giving a special sonority to the unique harmonies of the masterpiece - paired with the Prelude, fugue et variation transcribed for piano by Harold Bauer. Domenico Codispoti plays with a beautiful blend of grandeur and intimacy and a wonderful transparency.

· Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is one of the most important post-war composers, known for his highly complex music and extreme demands on the performers.

· In his two collections of Gershwin Arrangements Finnissy arranged many of the well-known songs for piano solo. Finnissy grew up often listening to LPs of this music, performed by popular singers as Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Ella Fitzgerald. On social occasions and in the jazz dance classes he accompanied early on in his career, he sometimes played these Gershwin songs. Some years later, this led to these wonderful compositions in which Gershwin’s famous melodies are, without serious alterations, recontextualized. The arrangements are rich and detailed with a polyphonic web that is filled with many layers of meaning.

· As Finnissy states, the inversion of mood in so many of these movements is central to his approach: “Tempo and harmony change from fast to slow, light to dark, and vice versa. Forceful sentiments become quite docile. Unbridled joy turns to melancholy. Blithe security is transformed into tense and upsetting ambiguity. Naïve grows cynical. Day changes into night, and girls become boys.” (Finnissy, 2004).

· Belgian pianist Lukas Huisman is one of the most remarkable and original pianists of his generation. From 2012 to 2016 he worked on an artistic doctoral project relating to contemporary complex solo piano music (Ferneyhough, Finnissy, Xenakis, Sorabji) at the School of Arts Ghent/University Ghent. He premièred Sorabji’s Symphonic Nocturne and recorded this monumental piece for solo piano on the Piano Classics label, for which he also recorded the piano music by Takemitsu, which was nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik

As the probably apocryphal recipient of a kiss from the ailing and elderly Beethoven, Franz Liszt was celebrated by his contemporaries as ‘the’ successor, the keeper of the flame, no less than several other composers equally deserving of that accolade from Schubert and Schumann to Brahms and Wagner. The connection between Liszt and Beethoven, however, is particularly strong in the medium of the piano, through which they spoke to the audiences of their time with a voice of untrammelled authority and vigor. Liszt’s project to transcribe the nine symphonies of Beethoven occupied him, on and off, for almost three decades. His aim was not merely to compress all the crucial instrumental voices within the compass of a single keyboard and ten fingers. More ambitiously, his transcriptions strive to ‘grasp the spirit of the work as well as the letter’, as he indicated in a preface to the collection. The Liszt/Beethoven Fifth is certainly no less bold, striking or relentless a path-breaking piece than the original, perhaps especially suited to the piano medium by virtue of its first movement’s defining and intrinsically percussive nature, which has attracted interpreters of the calibre of Glenn Gould and Paul Badura-Skoda. Now the marvelously gifted Leonardo Pierdomenico joins their ranks, with a critically acclaimed Piano Classics debut of.’ little-known Liszt already under his belt: ‘a stunning debut’ according to Gramophone. ‘Would that half the seasoned Lisztians I know had Pierdomenico’s keen ear for stylistic differentiation within this half-century of repertory. His highly developed technique and cultivated sound, both adaptable to a variety of affects, are wedded to those twin essentials for artistic Liszt-playing: imagination combined with thoroughgoing, scrupulous musicality.

Bernstein's piano output reflects the various strands of his multifaceted personality, in works as different as Touches (1981) and, at the other end of the scale, his often tender, sentimental Anniversaries. Taken together his piano works form a musical diary tracing the breadth of his experiences and ideas. Four of his Five Anniversaries (1949-51) appear as themes in his violin concerto, the Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium.” The personal commemorations he created were not portraits so much as self-portrayals, revealing different aspects of his own multi-faceted personality. To play these works well requires an understanding of the various elements that made up the Bernstein persona.

The Italian pianist Michele Tozzetti brings out the heartfelt tenderness of most of these tributes, the Jewish elements and the dance rhythms. In the Anniversary dedicated to Aaron Copland (in Seven Anniversaries, 1943), Tozzetti captures the sound and spirit of the man Bernstein called ‘my first friend in New York, my master, my idol, my sage, my shrink, my guide, my counselor, my elder brother, [and] my beloved friend.’ The pianist reveals a delicate sense of sonority along with fine dynamic control in For Paul Bowles, and brings an idiomatic edginess to For Sergei Koussevitzky. He also injects youthful vigor into Bernstein’s Sonata (1937), a probing work rich in counterpoint, written when the composer was still a student. Also on this recording are Non Troppo Presto, a manuscript discovered in the Leonard Bernstein archive at the Library of Congress; and Touches: Chorale, Eight Variations and Coda, commissioned by the Van Cliburn Piano Competition in 1981. Its bluesy chorale is identical to Virgo Blues, written for his daughter, Jamie on her twenty-sixth birthday in 1978. Bernstein dedicated this work ‘to my first love, the keyboard’. In Michele Tozzetti’s hands, that love is beautifully realized.

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REVIEW:

When you put it all together, there is a great deal to enjoy in Leonard Bernstein’s piano music. The Sonata, Music for the Dance, and Touches are strikingly stark and crunchy. The Sabras and Anniversaries are more personal and lyrical. The contrast between modernism and Bernstein’s more familiar nostalgic tunefulness is striking. The young pianist Michele Tozzetti plays with a deft touch and sharp articulation. As a bonus, one gets to read the superb program annotation of Stuart Isacoff, author of a wonderful new book on Van Cliburn.

– American Record Guide (Jack Sullivan)

Perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the history of music as a whole, let alone the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan remains one of the most intriguing and alluring names among the pantheon of pianist-composers. According to Franz Liszt, Alkan possessed the finest technique he had ever seen yet preferred the life of a recluse. The outstanding masterpiece of the album is the ‘Symphonie’ for solo piano which Alkan drew from his set of 12 Studies Op.39. It opens with an Allegro which is one of the composer’s most darkly impassioned conceptions, in which declamatory rhetoric, passionate outbursts and towering climaxes are all bound by a tightly organized structure. The piano writing is distinctly orchestral in nature, hence the ‘symphonic’ designation, demanding that the intrepid soloist make his or her way through towering conglomerations of sometimes ten note chords, thick, chordal tremoli and volleys of double octaves: only fully accredited virtuosi need apply! The Symphonie is placed on this album as the climax to a sequence of grand marches conceived on a similarly grand scale. They include the Three Cavalry Marches Op.39, which find Alkan at his most concise, in the Berliozian No.1, his most eccentric (the trio of No.2) and whimsical (No.3). Like them, the Marche funebre Op.26 bears witness to Alkan’s ability to channel a latent and, at times, menacing power through material of the slightest substance. The following Marche triomphale Op.27 is a massive, swaggering affair, in contrast to the ruminative melancholy of the opening paraphrase Op.45 on a poem by Legouve set in a cemetery and cast in Alkan’s most elegiac vein. A profound sadness also inflects the opening section of the composer’s ingenious instrumental setting of Psalm 137, ‘By the waters of Babylon’.

Emanuele Delucchi (b.1987) lives and works in Milan. He studied with Canzio Bucciarelli (Genoa), Riccardo Risaliti (Imola) and Davide Cabassi (Bozen), graduating in piano and composition. He gives solo recitals, with orchestra and in chamber music formation in Italy and abroad; he composes and lectures about the history of music. Emanuele Delucchi is one of the most remarkable pianists of his generation. He has the technique and style to master the most difficult pieces with easy, logic and elegance. He made a name with his recordings for Piano Classics of the insanely difficult Chopin Studies by Godowsky, played on a 1906 Steinway D, of which the Gramophone wrote: “Its palette of warm colors remained intact but gained a more incisive attack, allowing Delucchi’s voicing and extraordinary digital facility to be heard at its best...’. “Delucchi is in a class of his own”, Jed Distler of Classicstoday.com wrote: “9/9: every inch a viable contender to the reference”. He recently recorded the 24 Preludes and Fugues by Carl Czerny. This new recording presents Delucchi as a transcriber and composer. Of the Three transcriptions of Carlo Gesualdo he says: “Gesualdo's music has always fascinated me, for its modernity and originality in the panorama of late Renaissance music. The transcriptions are very faithful to the original, reducing the doubling to a minimum. The writing of the five voices, which is unmanageable on the keyboard, is achieved by keeping two parameters constant: the pitch and the duration of the notes (which means that the overall effect is identical, although the physiognomy of the individual voices is different).

‘A strange but wonderful album’: one of the accolades for Andrea Molteni’s debut album on Piano Classics, of the piano works by his countrymen Dallapiccola and Petrassi (PCL10222). For a sequel, he turns to the endlessly inventive store of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, who drew on his own extraordinary abilities at the keyboard to produce the illusion of written improvisations within a basic two-part form which left routine formulas of keyboard composition farther and farther behind. In a booklet conversation with the pianist and Lisztian Leslie Howard, Molteni explains that he has selected 18 lesser-known sonatas in a sequence which moves through the keys in the manner of The Well-Tempered Clavier, beginning with the A major virtuoso flourishes of K24 and ending with the G minor of K546. Howard praises the clarity and luminosity of Molteni’s touch; the sensitivity of his approach to ornamentation, which carefully emulates the effects and articulation available on a harpsichord as much as possible; strong dynamic contrasts; and the breathing pauses between sections, which allow for a change of registration like a harpsichord stop. Without observing the traditional pairings of Scarlatti’s sonatas, Molteni’s sequence encompasses the violinistic figurations of the early sonatas from the composer’s residence in Rome as well as the fandangos and guitaristic flourishes of his later and much longer stay in Madrid in service to the Princess (then Queen) Maria Magdalena Barbara. Scarlatti himself professed an aim of ‘ingenious jesting with art’ in a preface to one of volume of sonatas, and Molteni proves himself more than equal to the required balance between musical sophistication and virtuoso demands.

Thalberg has a reputation as the only pianist who made Liszt feel nervous, but he also won praise from Mendelssohn for the fidelity of his approach to the letter and the spirit of a score. He gathered four volumes of operatic and song transcriptions under the umbrella of L’art du chant appliqué au piano, with the first two volumes published in 1853 and followed a decade later by Volumes 3 and 4. While it opens with the Quartet from Bellini’s I Puritani, Thalberg’s selection of original material ranges far and wide beyond masterpieces of bel canto. There is a haunting transformation of a duet once attributed to the Neapolitan composer Stradella; a straightforward but affectionate transcription of Adelaide, the song by Beethoven that became his most popular piece of vocal music during the 19th century; as well as a much more elaborate fantasia on a number from the incidental music composed by Carl Maria von Weber for the Spanish drama Preciosa. There are some quintessentially Romantic-era walls of sound in the first two volumes of the collection, such as Thalberg’s version of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem, but the limpid textures and uncluttered singing lines of L’art du chant mark a salutary contrast with the cascades and thunderbolts of the hyper-virtuoso repertoire. In this regard, the lighter touch of the fortepiano is well suited to the ideals of vocal expression, transferred to the keyboard, enshrined in Thalberg’s collection. Roberto Commellato’s new version therefore brings something new to the work’s selective but distinguished discography.

In the centenary of his death in 1921, Camille Saint-Saëns is still patronized in some quarters as a prodigiously fluent musician of second-rate gifts. Yet his elders, his contemporaries and his students all esteemed him as an innovator as well as a gifted melodist and supremely disciplined technician in the craft as well as the art of composing. For Berlioz, the only problem with the child prodigy Saint-Saëns was that he knew too much. Ravel declared that he learnt everything he knew about orchestration from scores such as the Second Piano Concerto. Out of the composer’s five piano concertos, the Second has long established itself as the most popular thanks to a unique and winning stylistic progression neatly summed up ‘from Bach to Offenbach’, opening with a monumental cadenza and orchestral response in the manner of a Bachian prelude for organ, and winding up with an exhilarating tarantella. Three years after its composition in 1868, a version for solo piano was made by none other than Georges Bizet, Saint-Saëns’s short-lived contemporary. The arrangement was enthusiastically taken up by the composer, and it sheds valuable light on the essentially pianistic nature of his inspiration. This rarely encountered but fascinating transcription is complemented by ‘Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix’, the love-confession sung by Delila in the grand Biblical epic staging the downfall of Samson, in a solo piano version made by the Russian musicologist Boris Borodin. Another of the composer’s greatest admirers was Tchaikovsky, and Maria Stembolskaya adds a pair of piano fantasies inspired by the best-known of his stage works, Eugene Onegin: a free transcription of the third-act Polonaise made by Liszt, and a spectacular paraphrase of the opera’s main themes by one of his most talented students, Paul Pabst.

Acclaimed as China’s ‘premier interpreter of Bach’ by International Piano Magazine, the Chinese pianist Yuan Sheng has gained international recognition through his performances in the US and China, among many other countries. The New York Times praised Sheng’s performances of Bach as ‘models of clarity, balance and proportion’. His discography on Piano Classics includes several of the composer’s major cycles such as the Goldberg Variations (PCL0042) and Partitas (PCL10126) which have won critical acclaim for their agile rhythms and sensitive touch, informed by a profound understanding of the music’s origins for harpsichord and the expressive potential of its transfer to the modern piano, which he now passes on to students as a professor of piano at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. This depth of study and beauty of sound, informed by intensive study with Rosalyn Tureck, also mark out his newly recorded interpretations of five major piano cycles by Robert Schumann, who along with Chopin did more than any other composer to expand the horizons of the piano in the early decades of the 19th century and position it as the supreme articulation of a Romantic composer’s ambition in the hands of a single performer. Thus the present album makes an essential complement to Yuan Sheng’s extensive collection of Chopin’s work (including the Ballades, Impromptus, Preludes and 20 Nocturnes: PCL0049) issued by Piano Classics in 2013.

Recipient of a 10/10 rating by Gramophone!

The touch and musicianship of the Hungarian pianist Klára Würtz is amply attested by a substantial catalogue of Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics albums stretching from Mozart to Bartók. Her latest recording turns to a pillar of the keyboard repertoire, the variation set composed by J.S. Bach in 1741 as the fourth and final volume of his compendious Clavier-Übung (Keyboard exercise) project.

Practical instruction, entertainment and profound expression went hand in hand for Bach: one artistic goal never obscured the others. However, few of his works attain all three goals with the sublime mastery of the Goldberg Variations. The prowess of the performer is tested and placed on show as much as the ingenuity of the creative imagination in Bach’s most comprehensive response to the variation genre. ‘Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits’: the composer’s dedication and introduction makes the artistic intent of the Goldberg Variations plain. Every third variation in the series of 30 is a canon, following an ascending pattern. The variations that intervene between the canons are also arranged in a pattern, following an order of canon, genre piece (such as a minuet or gigue) and a more freely developed and ornate fantasia. The whole set is bookended by an aria in the style of a sarabande which already presents the theme in decorated form as a grave chaconne. The poised classicism of Klára Würtz’s pianism makes this new recording of the Goldbergs an album to be keenly anticipated by all pianophiles and lovers of Bach. She takes all the repeats, and plays with the full armory of the modern piano’s tonal capabilities.