This release presents the first books of both the Preludes and the Images, works in which Debussy found his mature piano style, full of unheard colors, atmospheres and perfumes, each with a descriptive title, but even without the title pure creations of imagination and craftmanship. Alessandra Ammara is one of the finest Italian pianists of today. Her affinity with the French impressionist music is confirmed by her extraordinary recording of Ravel's piano works.

The piano music of Federico Mompou (1893-1987) holds a unique place in 20-th century piano literature. The apparent simplicity of Mompou’s music with its affinity to naïve “folk” elements – popular songs and dances, children’s games, spells and incantations - is deceptive: like Satie - the composer with whom he is most often compared - there is always a sense of a greater complexity hidden just below the surface. However Mompou himself was uninterested in analyzing his music, claiming, “ I don’t know where it comes from – that’s one of the secrets of art” and in describing his style as primitivista, he signalled a desire to return to first principles - a “recommencement” as he described it. Although he spent many years in Paris and was close to the galaxy of composers living in that city in the 1920s– becoming more or less and an honorary member of les Six - he remained virtually immune to outside influences.

The Concord Sonata by Charles Ives is without doubt the most iconic American piano sonata. Its epic length (appr. 50 minutes), its extreme technical difficulties and its highly unusual form and writing make it one of the greatest challenges for any performing pianist. Any new recording of it is an event. The sonata’s 4 movements represent figures associated with the Transcendentalism movement: Ralph Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. The piece demonstrates Ives' experimental tendencies: much of it is written without barlines, the harmonies are advanced, and in the second movement there is a cluster chord created by depressing the piano's keys with a piece of wood. The piece also amply demonstrates Ives' fondness for musical quotation (especially Beethoven’s 5th). Pianist Thomas Hell is widely recognised as a specialist of 20th century piano repertoire. He recorded works by Carter, Schoenberg, Dallapiccola, Boulez and the complete Etudes by Ligeti. “A clear frontrunner.” - Classicstoday.com

This first recording for Piano Classics by Lukas Geniusas presents two 19th c. masterworks, sonatas of extraordinary length, scope and content. Brahms’ First Piano Sonata op. 1 (“a veiled symphony” according to Schumann) is a young man’s answer to Beethoven’s colossal ‘Hammerklavier’, a work of unprecedented impact which radically changed the concept of the sonata in the 19th c. The 24 year old Lukas Geniušas concertizes all around the world, playing his extraordinary programs, which sometimes feature performances of Chopin’s 24 Etudes and Rachmaninov’s 24 Preludes.

German pianist Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy is one of the leading pianists of his generation. His concert activities and recordings mark him as an extremely intelligent musician with immense technical powers. His recordings of Brahms, Schumann and Rachmaninoff have won him rave reviews all over the world. His Chopin interpretations on this new recording breathe an air of improvisation, vision and imagination. Listening to his interpretation of the Preludes evokes a synesthetic experience: The sounds, views and smells of Mallorca (where they were composed) merge into one feeling of beauty, bliss and melancholy.

• The Italian, late romantic composer Francesco Cilea is most remembered for his verismo opera Adrienne Lecouvreur. • He also composed chamber and solo music, a selection of which is presented on this CD. • The piano works are wonderfully evocative character pieces, in the style of early Debussy. • Italian pianist Sandro de Palma plays these works with great clarity and feeling. • Recorded 1990, Teatro Grande di Brescia, Italy

This CD (80 minutes!) contains the complete works for two pianos by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Substantial and impressive works, these are expertly and originally written in virtuoso style (as one would expect from one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century), music of great imagination, poetry and passion.

Classical Music

Tatiana Nikolaeva's prophesy about her pupil Nikolai Lugansky - "He is the next one"- has come true. Lugansky is now regarded as one of the major pianists from the Russian Piano School, enjoying a dazzling career across all the continents, playing with the most important orchestras and conductors in world renowned concert venues. He is universally praised for his sincere interpretations, his honesty, his deep burning passion and (last but not least) his limitless and unbelievably perfected technique. This Schumann program offers two major large scale works, played with grandeur and nobility, and a dazzling performance ofsynthesize the fiendishly difficult Toccata. Splendid sonics are featured on this recording dating from the mid-nineties.

•A fascinating programme of three variations cycles from different style periods. The Beethoven Eroica variations, The Piano Variations by Aaron Copland and The Chopin Variations by Sergei Rachmaninoff. This is the second release on Piano Classics by Georgian pianist Alexander Korsantia, presently residing in Boston, USA. His first disc was devoted to Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

Alexander Korsantia is a force of nature. These live performances of this Russian Rubenstein competition winner show a red hot immediacy, excitement, and adrenalin usually absent in studio recordings. The terror of Prokofiev's War Sonatas, the orchestral colors of Stravinsky's Firebird and the tongue-in-cheek of the Circus Polka and Tango: all these brilliant performances evoke the visceral emotions of a unique concert experience.

Crowning the very summit of the piano concerto literature are the two examples by Brahms, posing as stern a test of technique, temperament and poetic feeling to the interpreter now as they did when they were composed over a century and a half ago. The urgent, impulsive drama of the First, which propelled Brahms into international standing as a performer as well as a composer, was answered more than 20 years later by the more spaciously conceived Second, often more light-hearted in character yet making even more strenuous demands upon it's performers as a fully symphonic concerto. Those demands are met here by the Italian pianist Vincenzo Maltempo (b.1985), whose recordings of Romantic piano music have won critical superlatives. Of his debut on the label with the notoriously exacting music of Alkan, PianoNews considered Maltempo to be "one of the greatest contemporary interpreters of this composer... no other pianist as Maltempo has managed to dominate in a so well thought-out and orchestral way the enormous difficulties." According to Andrew Clements in The Guardian, the album is "Exhilarating, demonic, a real revelation." Four further albums of Alkan's music followed for the label, as well as the Hungarian Rhapsodies by Liszt and the 12 Etudes d'ex�cution transcendante Op.11 of Lyapunov. As Maltempo's first concerto recording, this album is sure to be welcomed by not only his many followers but also all those listeners with their ear to the ground for modern virtuoso pianists. Here he is partnered by the Italian-based Mitteleuropa Orchestra under it's principal conductor, Marco Guidarini, who is an experienced opera conductor across Europe and the US. This album presents the live registration of both the Brahms piano concertos, as played by Vincenzo Maltempo on two consecutive nights with the Mitteleuropa Orchestra, conducted by Marco Guidarini.

Any listeners who thrill to Iber�a and Goyescas will want to get their hands on Andaluc�a. Cast in nine movements, divided into three parts, it paints a vivid portrait in sound of the Spanish region, it's landscapes, it's people, folk-culture and traditions. It is the major piano composition by Manuel Font y de Anta, who was born in the region's capital of Seville on 10 December 1889. He is still well-known in the region thanks to a pair of religiously themed wind-band marches, which are unofficial anthems for the city, particularly during Holy Week. Font y de Anta studied music with his father, the composer Manuel Font Hern�ndez, with the Chapel Masters of the Seville Cathedral Vicente Ripoll�s and Eduardo Torres, and with Joaqu�n Turina. During his early twenties he toured the US as a pianist and conductor before settling in Madrid, where he became known as a composer of popular songs and marches. He died in the city, aged just 46, at the hands of Communist militia in November 1936. Andaluc�a mostly dates from 1913-14, except for two movements composed in 1918 and 1921. The cycle begins with an impressionistic evocation of romantic yearning, en el parque de Maria Luisa, and it's followed by two, briefer, more extrovert pieces. The central Cuaderno begins with Alhambra, an even more sensuous, nocturnal love scene set in the gardens of the palace. A dance movement with a central barcarolle is followed by the cycle's most ambitious and complex piece, Perchel. A sultry evocation of the mosque at Cordoba leads into the poetic masterpiece of Andaluc�a, en un patio sevillano. The cycle concludes with a virtuosic showpiece, en los Toros. The cycle as a whole is a worthy successor to Iber�a and Goyescas. It is championed here by the Italian pianist Riccardo Schwartz, a pupil of Paul Badura-Skoda. This major release will bring his name to an international public.

Winner of the prestigious Premio Venezia prize, Vincenzo Maltempo 'rides high among many young and gifted Italian pianists.' (Gramophone, January 2015). His recordings on Piano Classics have won critical acclaim for their technical finesse and musical sensitivity. His latest release is a timely one, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth in Bonn with the two major variation sets and the ever-elusive, whimsical Bagatelles which have taxed the hands and imaginations of all the greatest pianists. All the works here derive ultimately from the composer's instincts as an improviser and thinker at the keyboard: playing continually with ideas both physical and intellectual, working them over and around the body of the instrument that was his own principal medium of expression. The Op. 34 variations marked a seachange in the composer's treatment of his form, sharing the expressive reach of his sonatas and concluding with an ambitious fugue. Even the Eroica Variations, however, give little notice of the visionary transformation wrought upon an upbeat but modest waltz, sent to him by his publisher Diabelli, in his final work in variation form. They occupied Beethoven on and off for five years, during which time he explored every possibility of the theme and of variation-form itself. The result is, in the words of Alfred Brendel, 'the greatest of all piano works.' Here and in the final Bagatelles we find Beethoven challenging even the outer limits of his own prodigious imagination as well as the fingers of his performers and the minds of his listeners. Amid the cavalcade of Beethoven releases in 2020, Maltempo's new album is a big event.

Born in 1987, Emanuele Delucchi has gained renown both in his native Italy and farther afield for his cool-headed mastery of the 'hyper-virtuoso' composers after Liszt who pushed the boundaries of keyboard technique to it's farthest limits. He is among the foremost modern exponents of Charles-Valentin Alkan, and this is his third album for Piano Classics celebrating both the original works and transcriptions made by Leopold Godowsky. 'For an entr�e into the polyphonic world of Godowsky, Emanuele Delucchi's programme could hardly be bettered,' said Gramophone of Delucchi's programme of the Passacaglia, original Poems and a selection of transcriptions. The performances are distinguished by 'great technical accomplishment and a relaxed, assured empathy': a verdict echoed by Classics Today in reviewing Delucchi's 2017 album of the elaborations and transformations wrought by Godowsky on Chopin's Etudes Op.10: 'every inch a viable contender alongside the Marc-Andr� Hamelin and Carlo Grante reference versions... Delucchi's total comfort with and absorption of Godowsky's serpentine idiom makes itself felt in every measure. Needless to say, I look forward to Delucchi's performances of the remaining studies.' This desire is now granted with the release of the complementary set of works based on Chopin's Op.25 Etudes. Godowsky composed them over a period of decades, and they challenge every facet of the pianist's technique, condensing some studies into a left-hand only part, adding secondary voices to others and taking still others as the basis for free variation and fantasy. He could claim without false modesty that the fingering and pedaling involved in such feats were of 'an often revolutionary character' and in Delucchi he has a dedicated modern advocate. As an introduction to the works on this album we quote Godowsky himself: "the studies' aim is to develop the mechanical, technical and musical possibilities of piano playing, to expand the peculiarly adapted nature of the instrument to polyphonic, polyrhythmic and polydynamic work and to widen the range of it's possibilities in tone coloring".