Piano Classics
140 products
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Godowsky: Transcriptions
$21.99CDPiano Classics
Jan 09, 2026PCL10329 -
Lili & Nadia Boulanger: Piano Music
$21.99CDPiano Classics
Jan 09, 2026PCL10325 -
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Alkan: Early Works & Juvenilia
$19.99CDPiano Classics
Jul 18, 2025PCL10298 -
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Godowsky: Transcriptions
Blasco De Nebra: Complete Piano Works
Lili & Nadia Boulanger: Piano Music
Malipiero: Piano Works
Sgambati: 6 Nocturnes, Etudes & Other Works
Liszt: Weihnachtsbaum & Two Movements from Christmas
Chopin: Nocturnes (Complete)
Ravel, Wagner & Liszt: Transcriptions for Piano 4-Hands
Reger: Bach Variations, Op. 81; Traume am Kamin
Beethoven: Con alcune licenze
New recordings of late Beethoven at his
most heroic and visionary.
Andrea Molteni plays Scarlatti with ‘ringing
tone and virtuosic agility’ reported Fanfare
magazine of the Italian pianist’s collection of
sonatas on Piano Classics (PCL10233). The
Art Music Lounge praised his bold
juxtaposition of Petrassi and Dallapiccola
(PCL10222) as ‘a strange but wonderful
album’, noting that ‘Molteni sparkles as he
rips through the music with energy and
élan’.
These qualities hold him in good stead for
the rigours of late Beethoven. With his
‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata of 1818, the
composer challenged pianists and listeners
alike to assimilate a work unprecedented in
its length and complexity. Motivically linked
by a descending third through the eventful
course of its four movements, the Sonata
opens with a precipitous Allegro. A mordant
Scherzo then introduces a long and
spiritually engaged slow movement, before
the mighty finale hurtles towards its epic
conclusion through a densely wrought
fugue. In each aspect, then, the Sonata
outlines blueprints for what would become
known as Beethoven’s late style, whether
expressed in solo, chamber, orchestral or
vocal music. The most celebrated single
result of that late style is the Grosse Fuge
which Beethoven wrote as the finale to his
String Quartet Op.131. Persuaded by his
publisher to substitute it for a less arduous
conclusion, Beethoven left this mighty fugue
to stand on its own, and so it has stood ever
since, as a ferocious yet rewarding exercise
of concentration and contrapuntal art.
Molteni presents it in a 19th-century
arrangement made by Louis Winkler which
has attracted surprisingly few recordings.
At the centre of Molteni’s recital, the Sonata
Op.110 offers salutary contrast. Here too are
examples of heroism, rustic humour and
melancholy, but distilled to an essence of
vitality.
Explorer Set - French Edition
Schumann: Novelletten Op. 21; Nachtstucke Op. 23
Sorabji: Toccata Terza
The first recording of another monumental work for piano by the composer of Opus clavicembalisticum and Sequentia cyclica.
Kaikhosru Sorabji tended to discourage performances of his music, feeling that most musicians not only lacked the technical equipment and dedication to conquer his vast scores, but also that they would not satisfactorily grasp their spiritual content. Born in a London suburb of Parsee origin, living for much of his life on a remote Scottish island, Sorabji died in 1988, and only in the last two decades have advances in digital publishing enabled his many unperformed and intimidatingly large pieces to be transferred from manuscript, and then taken on by dedicated performers such as the British pianist Jonathan Powell, whose first recording of the eight-hour Sequentia Cyclica won widespread praise on its release by Piano Classics: Sorabji’s ‘most inclusive and revealing major statement’ according to Gramophone, ‘a wilful yet engrossing challenge that, in Powell, has met its match.’ Composed in the mid-1950s, the Toccata terza had been thought lost until the score turned up in 2019, and Abel Sánchez-Aguilera has produced his own critical edition in order to make this first recording: a monumental labour of love and skill. The Toccata is cast in ten sections, including a 50-minute Passacaglia – one of Sorabji’s favourite forms – and the kind of thorny counterpoint and mountainous climaxes which will be familiar to followers of his music. There are four extant Toccatas: ‘They seem to look back to the examples of Bach and Busoni,’ as Sánchez-Aguilera remarks in his booklet introduction, ‘reinvented in Sorabji’s personal language and expanded to monumental proportions. Notwithstanding their complexity, several features make them particularly effective and accessible to the listener. They make use of familiar procedures – such as the variation and the fugue – and thus establishing clear links with tradition.’
No Sorabji collector will ignore this major new release of his music, and searchers for rarities in the hyper-virtuoso piano repertoire will discover a new treasure.
Shostakovich & Pupils, Vol. 1 / Damiano
The first volume in an adventurous new series juxtaposing the piano music of Shostakovich with his most talented pupils. All three of the younger composers here demonstrate the individuality of their own voice.
Least known of them now is German Galynin (1922-1966). In 1951, the year in which he paradoxically obtained the Stalin Prize for his Epic Poem on Russian Themes, Galynin began suffering from schizophrenia that he was admitted to an asylum, and continued to received psychiatric care for the rest of his short life. He wrote this five-movement Suite in 1945, while still a student at the Conservatoire, and it alternates somewhat prophetically between moods of mania and melancholy.
Shostakovich himself cited Alemdar Karamanov (1934-2007) as one of the most original composers of his time. Ukrainian born but of Turkish parentage, he studied in Moscow before returning to Crimea, converting to Christianity and thus consigning himself to obscurity at the time, and his later music shares an experimental, visionary quality with contemporary pioneers such as Schnittke, Denisov, and Gubaidulina. The Variations for piano (1962) belong to the last phase of his Moscow period.
The career of Boris Tchaikovsky (1925-1996) proceeded along smoother lines. The single-movement Sonatina from 1946 is again a student work, albeit a highly talented and disciplined one, with the kind of thorough-going understanding of Classical form which Shostakovich evidently instilled in and expected from his students.
Fernanda Damiano juxtaposes these pianistic rarities with several pieces which demonstrate the breadth of style and confidence of artistic personality that made Shostakovich stand out from his contemporaries. Alongside the fleet-fingered brilliance of the Three Fantastic Dances and the Polka from his ballet The Golden Age, she plays a trio of Preludes and Fugues (Nos. 1, 7 & 24) from the collection he wrote for Tatiana Nikolaeva, another pupil, in 1950-51.
Schumann, Hindemith, Mosolov & Brahms: With a Little Expression
Isn't the will not to be expressive already an expression? This is the rhetorical question which the Iranian pianist Arash Rokni wanted to answer, in a unique recital on record coupling high-Romantic and early-Modernist works. ‘Perhaps Paul Hindemith asked himself the same question,' Rokni muses in his introduction to the album, 'when he wrote the instructions for the player in his Nachtstück 'not to play without expression, not with expression, but only with a little expression!’
Born in Tehran in 1993, Rokni grew to love classical music through his parents, and he gained a place at the Tehran Music School before pursuing further specialist studies in Germany, at the conservatoires in Leipzig and Cologne, and he now holds teaching posts in both Cologne and Hannover. He won second prize and audience prize in the Bach Competition in Leipzig in 2018.
Arash Rokni has played and studied with Andreas Staier, having a particular interest in Classical and Romantic performance practice. This release marks his debut on Piano Classics, and establishes him as a thoughtful and accomplished musician with individual ideas about repertoire both familiar and lesser known. He plays two contrasting instruments, each chosen to complement the soundworld of their repertoire: an 1890 Bluthner for the Schumann and Brahms pieces, and a modern Paulello for Mosolov and Hindemith.
Mosolov is known for a single brief piece, the Iron Foundry for orchestra which won a kind of infamy for its naturalistic brutality. There is of course a good deal more to him than unrelenting dissonance, and his piano music shares with his contemporary Alexander Scriabin a mystical character, floating between and in and out of key signatures. Its specifically ‘expressive’ character is not straightforward, any more than the Suite 1922 where Hindemith plays with pop styles of the time such as jazz and ragtime. The expression of Schumann’s Bunte Blätter is not necessarily more straightforward, and Brahms made his own interpretation of it with a set of Variations which he wrote on the first piece in Schumann’s cycle.
Fanny Mendelssohn, Vol. 2 / Gaia Sokoli
Alkan: Early Works & Juvenilia
Part: Lamentate (Biovinyl)
An audiophile LP transfer presents a highly praised recording of a monumental tribute from one great artist to another.
Arvo Pärt, likely the most performed living composer, found inspiration to compose Lamentate in 2002 from a work by sculptor Anish Kapoor. Kapoor's sculpture, titled Marsyas, alludes to the classical legend of the satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest and faced a brutal fate for his audacity. Occupying the vast expanse of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London, Kapoor's sculpture evokes humanity's Promethean daring in abstract form. In response, commissioned by the Tate, Pärt crafted his largest work of instrumental music.
Upon encountering the sculpture, Pärt remarked, "my first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead, as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present. Suddenly, I found myself put in a position in which my life appeared in a different light." Comprising 10 movements spanning 40 minutes, Lamentate transcends grief for a specific individual, elevating its themes to more universal concerns.
"Death and suffering are the themes that concern every person born into this world," Pärt reflects. "Accordingly, I have written a lamento – not for the dead, but for the living, who have to deal with these issues for themselves. A lamento for us, who don’t have it easy dealing with the pain and hopelessness of the world." Pärt's composition contributes to a tradition of semi-sacred or secular liturgies of grief, remembrance, and transfiguration, echoing works like Brahms' German Requiem, Strauss' Four Last Songs, and Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls.
This Spanish-made version, previously released on CD and digital formats, garnered critical acclaim for its dedicated performance and the depth of field in its engineering. The new transfer to the analogue format of LP underscores the richness of the recording's sound.
Scarlatti: Sonatas on Vinyl / Schmitt-Leonardy
A luxury-grade vinyl transfer in a gatefold 2LP set for a beautifully engineered 2021 album of Scarlatti on the piano from a master German pianist.
On its CD release in 2022, this personal choice from Scarlatti’s 555 keyboard sonatas won an enthusiastic welcome from Gramophone. ‘Contrasts of mood together with unified relationships of tempo and key signature characterise one the most intelligently programmed and distinctively played Scarlatti collections to cross my reviewer’s desk in years.’
Hardly less than Bach, these sonatas have become for many pianists a proving ground for their own technique and imagination, rewarding an improvisatory response to their flamboyant effects. Schmitt-Leonardy also features several of Scarlatti’s most poetic and reflective sonatas such as the ‘Aria’ Kk 29 and the melancholy soliloquy of Kk 208.
The approach taken by Schmitt-Leonardy is always ‘pianistic’, in that he exploits the full tonal resources of a modern concert grand. Yet his phrasing is also sensitive to 18th-century style and to the kind of effects and articulation particular to the harpsichord for which Scarlatti was writing. ‘Kaleidoscopic nuances and dynamic gradations abound throughout the E major Kk135,’ continued the Gramophone reviewer Jed Distler, the Gramophone reviewer Jed Distler, ‘but not garishly so. Nor does the pianist’s curvaceous and tapered phrasing throughout the A major Kk322 lapse into mannerism or cliché.’
As with all Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics LPs, this set is issued on 180-gram, high-grade vinyl pressed at the Optimal factory in Hamburg. Its audiophile quality is worthy of performances which bear comparison with great Scarlatti performers of past and present from Horowitz to Pletnev. Inner-sleeve booklet notes by Peter Quantrill discuss each of the sonatas in turn.
Lekeu: Complete Piano Works / Salvatori
The most complete set of Lekeu’s piano music ever recorded, demonstrating the full range of genius cut off in his prime.
After his death from typhoid fever at the age of just 24, in January 1894, Debussy and many others lamented the passing of a musician with the world at his feet. ‘There is a Belgian school,’ wrote Debussy in 1896. ‘Next to Franck, Lekeu is one of its most remarkable representatives, this Lekeu, the only musician to my knowledge whom Beethoven really inspired.’
Partly due to his sudden demise, very little of his extant music has been published; among the works for piano only the monumental, five-movement Sonata in G minor, an album of three beautiful short pieces written in 1892, and a Mazurka. Jacopo Salvatori demonstrates, on this groundbreaking new album, how much else there is for pianophiles and enthusiasts for French romanticism to enjoy.
In his booklet note, Salvatori describes how he tracked down the manuscripts for several pieces heard here effectively for the first time. They include a beautiful four voices fugue written in 1889, a piece clearly influenced by the teaching of Franck. There is also a series called Morceaux egoists, of which some are lost, but there are pointers in what survives towards a different side of Lekeu to the one known from the familiar, Wagnerian richness of the Violin Sonata. Even the Piano Sonata takes on a different complexion as potentially more of a Suite, somewhat loosely assembled, but unified by a poetic motto from the writer George Vanor. Shedding such light on Lekeu makes Salvatori’s album a unique and valuable contribution to the appreciation of a still little-known but powerfully talented voice of the Belle Epoque.
Chopin: Etudes / Chochieva
On 180gm vinyl, a new LP mastering for Zlata Chochieva’s definitive modern recording of a landmark in the Romantic virtuoso repertoire.
In March 2013, Bryce Morrison in Gramophone welcomed Zlata Chochieva’s debut on Brilliant Classics, playing Rachmaninoff (PCL0047) noting that she is ‘the possessor of a comprehensive technique who brings an inner glow to every bar. Her phrasing is indelibly Russian in its fullness and warmth, backed by a dauntless and easy command.’
Her recordings have continued to attract such praise, with this recording of the Chopin Etudes winning an Editor’s Choice award in 2015. It was claimed that one renowned pianist regarded Chochieva’s interpretation as ‘the greatest I’ve ever heard’ – backed up by Jeremy Nicholas writing in Gramophone that ‘in each of the 27 studies Chochieva comes as close to anyone to how I hear the ideal performance in my head, or as I would wish to play them had I the ability to do so… Taken as read are a superlative technique and an ideal recorded sound… One of the most consistently inspired, masterfully executed and beautiful sounding versions I can recall.’
On LP, Chochieva’s version deserves to take its place alongside classic traversals such as Pollini on DG. As with all Piano Classics LPs, the vinyl version has been mastered at the Optimal factory, renowned for its audiophile standards. The LP is packaged as a gatefold with an extensive essay on the Etudes and a full biography for Chochieva, which concludes with this endorsement from Stephen Kovacevich: ‘Zlata Chochieva is one of the most interesting and unusual pianists today. She has superb technical abilities, but it is her personal intuition in the music she play s that is special. I would be interested to hear anything she does and that is rare.’
Field: 18 Nocturnes / Tyler Hay
As the pre-eminent forerunners to Chopin’s works in the same genres, the Nocturnes of John Field have few rivals for music well known by history but so seldom heard. They were largely inspired by the slow movements of Classical concertos, Mozart above all, as well as opera arias. From them, Field evolved his own firm concept of a form with rich harmonies and gentle dynamics to suggest the night and dreaming, though in fact he began by giving these pieces traditional names such as Pastorale, Serenade and "Romance. He wrote the 18 works not as a set, but over the course of 15 years, rarely completing more than one and never more than three in a single year. Liszt observed in them ‘The total absence of everything that looks to effect'.
Even when he settled upon Nocturne, Field bestowed upon some of them a qualifying subtitle: ‘Cradle Song’ (No.6), ‘Reverie’ (No.7), ‘Song Without Words’ (No.13), ’Nocturne Pastorale’ (No.17), and ‘Nocturne characteristique Midi’ (No.18). This last Nocturne stands apart from its companions as a tribute to midday, cast as an Allegro, with a coda in which a chiming clock strikes twelve as quicker notes laugh and dance around the repeated note.
As a window on the salons of 19th century Europe, the Nocturnes are taxing neither to play nor to listen to, but they are polished with painstaking finesse, and they demand from the performer all the subtle pianistic guile of Chopin’s works: notably a command of rubato to shape the melodies, and the imaginative and technical capacities of a coloristic palette to bring variety without eccentricity to the sequence.
Tyler Hay can call upon such talents and skills as critics have recognized in his previous recordings for Piano Classics such as an album devoted to the music of John Ogdon (PCL10132) ‘Tyler Hay is a formidable pianist… I believe John Ogdon would be very pleased by these performances of his music’ (Fanfare). ‘The young pianist Tyler Hay has brilliantly mastered and assimilated these often elusive scores, even to the point where I heretically prefer his interpretations to Ogdon’s’ (Gramophone).
Benjamin: Complete Piano Works
The only collected survey of George Benjamin’s
piano music on record, from a Dutch pianist
who specialises in new music and has worked
closely with the composer.
Benjamin was an accomplished pianist as well
as composer from his early years, and it seems
natural in retrospect that his first published
work should be the Piano Sonata he composed
in 1977-8, as a prodigious student of Olivier
Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod. Certain harmonic
touches may mark the sonata out as the work
of ‘a Messiaen pupil’ but the unsettled, leaping
gestural sense of the piece is particular to
Benjamin. So much of Benjamin’s later music is
fascinatingly prefigured here, including a sense
of timing for a gradual accumulation of tension
(‘stormy eruptions’ and ‘savage violence’ in
the composer’s words) that marks out his first
major orchestral score, Ringed by the Flat
Horizon. Underlying that sense of timing is a
feeling for dramatic gesture which has found
its natural expression in a series of operas
written during the last 20 years.
Dedicated to Loriod, Sortilèges (1981) makes
clear its French heritage in the notes as well as
the title, while the three subsequent Studies
for piano, composed over the next four years,
find Benjamin working out intricate rhythmic
problems and their solutions. Even the
Relativity Rag takes a quirky, sideways look at
its superficially familiar material. The next
piano pieces had to wait until 2001, and the
Shadowlines which Benjamin wrote for PierreLaurent Aimard. This set of six canonic preludes
takes Benjamin’s inclination to distill and pare
back to a new level, while the piano writing
itself is richer and more unselfconsciously
informed by the heritage of piano literature.
Finally, there are the Piano Figures of 2004,
written for students of the piano and
accordingly pitched at a technically lower level
than the other pieces, but no less preoccupied
with the rhythmic games and sudden swerves
of thought that are hallmarks of his most
complex music. All these pieces have been
recorded, but never by the same pianist,
making Erik Bertsch’s new collection unique,
and indispensable for any collector of new
music.
De Gambarini: Complete Works for Keyboard
Bach: Goldberg Variations / Klára Würtz
A superb, collector’s-item vinyl transfer for a recent and widely acclaimed recording of Bach’s nocturnal meditations. When Piano Classics released this recording of the Goldberg Variations on CD in 2022, critics praised its natural phrasing and unobtrusively skilful and sensitive response to the technical demands made by Bach in his most virtuosic piece of keyboard writing.
According to Fanfare magazine, the playing of Klára Würtz ‘has limpid clarity, and rhythmic firmness and exactitude; her articulation is clean and nimble (she has a cleaner trill than Perahia), and her voicing of different lines is splendidly balanced. Her rapid playing is vigorous, her slower playing has calm repose. Her interpretive outlook has spirit and vivacity, but also a total sense of confidence and security, the kind of integrity that needs no ostentatious display to make its mark of absolute rightness... Perahia now has a pianistic rival on my shelf; strongly recommended.’ Reviewers elsewhere were hardly less enthusiastic. ‘Cards on the table, what Würtz’s Goldbergs offer is calm appreciation of the music’s manifold beauties,’ according to Rob Cowan in Gramophone. ‘Her pianism sidesteps overt display or affectedness in favour of purely musical values... This for me is truly great piano playing, a direct route to the soul with no tiresome diversions along the way.’ Vinyl collectors can now enjoy this superb recording in a new transfer made for analogue at the Edel factory in Hamburg, which specialises in collector’s print LP editions such as this one.
The heavy-grade vinyl has exemplary quiet surfaces, and the Dutch church acoustics of the original recording gain a rounded, luminous quality which ideally complements Klára Würtz’s pianism. The set is issued as a 2LP gatefold with booklet notes on the inner sleeve.
