While Clementi’s sparkling music has been recorded by many celebrated pianists such as Arturo Benedetti MIchelangeli, few of them have paid much attention to the composer’s first published collection. This new recording by Carlo Alberto Bacchi is all the more welcome for being informed by his study of the composer’s complete oeuvre as part of the ‘Clementi Project’ which sees him performing many of the sonatas in concert as well as recording them for Piano Classics.

The inscription on Clementi’s tomb in Westminster Abbey commemorates him as ‘the father of the piano’. Clementi above all was responsible for devising a modern technique, of the kind still recognisable today, which would serve pianists on the larger instruments being manufactured in the early years of the 19th century. This technique is differentiated from harpsichord technique, and trained not just through lessons but through pianistic ‘methods’ and publications such as these sets of sonatas, which are arranged in order of progressive difficulty in order to introduced students to technical challenges step by step. Like Mozart, Clementi also manifested his musical talents at a very early age: at the age of 7, he was already studying organ, singing and counterpoint; he wrote a mass at the age of 11 and an oratorio at the age of 12.

The English nobleman and eccentric Sir Peter Beckford effectively bought the young Clementi on a seven-year contract and kept him at his West Country pile. When the contract with Beckford expired in 1774, Clementi moved to London and took off on a career that brought him fame across Europe – as a touring virtuoso, a teacher, publisher – and even sometimes composer. The six Op.1 sonatas were published in 1771, during Clementi’s period in service to Beckford. Although he was not yet 20 and almost completely self-taught, they show his mastery of material and his irrepressible invention. All the sonatas have a simple, playful and light-hearted character, and a two-movement form. The five Sonatas of Opus 1a, on the other hand, date from a decade later, even after the Op.6 Sonatas. They were published in Paris around 1781, and here we sense the stirrings of Clementi as ‘father of the piano’ in the cascades and doublings and expanded imagination.

A budget-priced box of critically acclaimed piano albums exploring the rich diversity of Slavic piano music: an ideal introduction to the Romantic and post-Romantic world of Slavic pianism beyond the canon of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

The notable feature of this set dedicated to piano music by composers from Slavic nations is its sheer diversity. It would be possible to trace their writing for the keyboard back variously to Chopin and Schumann, but the same could be said of any other group of composers around Europe from the late 19th century onwards. What the set does illustrate is the rise of pianists, trained in a system that became known as the ‘Russian Piano School’, who could take on such formidably demanding scores as Lyapunov’s Transcendental Studies and Medtner’s ‘Winter Wind’ Sonata.

Pianist-composers such as Bortkeiwicz, Blumenfeld and Medtner flourished across Europe in the first decades of the last century, and so did piano manufacturers, producing ever more reliable and tonally sophisticated instruments that could cope with the rigours of these scores. A generation before them, Viteslav Novak in the Czech Republic and Dora Pejacevic in Croatia were writing less prodigiously demanding music which took its expressive cue from the tone-pictures of Schumann rather than the broader canvases of Liszt. In Ukraine, Viktor Kosenko was one of several composers here to use old church modes in his narmony, lending it both a patina of antiquity and at times an other-worldly novelty. In Romania, George Enescu pursued this path still further in finding a new world for the piano hardly less distinctive than Scriabin’s.

Back in Ukraine, the music of Ihor Shamo embodies a kind of melancholy yearning that is both a natural inheritance from Rachmaninoff and perhaps the nearest to a ‘Slavic’ expressive trait. All the performances here were recorded within the last decade and received with critical enthusiasm on their release.

This budget reissue includes all the original sleeve notes, making it a worthwhile investment for collectors and newcomers alike.

Past praise of previously released volumes included in this set:

Blumenfeld: Préludes (24) / Mark Viner

A welcome disc that adds two substantial Etudes in addition to the Preludes. Felix Blumenfeld (1863–1931), was a celebrated pianist, conductor, and teacher whose pupils included Horowitz and Barere. That is certainly worth boasting about. Of his own compositions, there is certainly plenty of craftsmanship at hand, if maybe not the ultimate in originality. Would I recommend this? Definitely.

-- American Record Guide

Pejačević: Piano Music / Ekaterina Litvintseva

Ekaterina Litvintseva’s new anthology covering about half of Dora Pejačević's piano music seriously raises her profile. Moving chronologically from her early salonesque trifles to her powerful Second Sonata, a work clearly preparing the way for an abandonment of tonality, it features exceptional playing from the supremely gifted pianist.

-- Fanfare

Novák: Pan / Tobias Borsboom

Inspired by the idea of the Greek god Pan, the work is a sprawling and ambitious one that evokes impressionist uses of tone color and Richard Strauss’s tone poems. There are lovely movements, especially in the blossoming melodies in `Mountains’. `Sea’ has some rippling melodies and lush harmonies. Borsboom offers useful liner notes to illuminate the use of thematic material in the work, especially how the `Prologue’ presents a theme and melodies that appear in the rest of the movements. It is a bit hard to hear the cyclical unity, though, and this music might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Borsboom’s playing is very capable.

-- American Record Guide

Enescu: Suite, Op. 18; Piano Sonata No. 3 / Saskia Giorgini

Saskia Giorgini’s idiomatic virtuosity is completely at one with Enescu’s sound world. By holding the first-movement of the Third Sonata's Vivace con brio ever-so-slightly back, Giorgini secures steadier rhythm throughout and conveys greater differentiation between detached and sustained passages. She keeps the long Andantino cantabile hauntingly afloat as she contours the music’s melodic, accompanimental and purely decorative elements in three-dimensional perspective. The same can be said regarding the Allegro con spirito’s conversational counterpoint and appropriately muted left-hand repeated-note ostinatos; here is where the Bösendorfer’s ‘fortepiano in the body of a concert grand’ timbre particularly speaks. In short, Giorgini has truly internalized this elusive, oddly gripping music, whetting the appetite for an eventual Enescu cycle. Recommended.

-- Gramophone

A young Italian virtuoso breathes new life into the ornate fantasies of a Dutch Baroque master.

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) enjoyed a great reputation in his time that spread throughout northern Europe and Scandinavia. He attracted pupils from afar, Heinrich Scheidemann, Jacob Praetorius and Samuel Scheidt being the most famous. Sweelinck's influence can, therefore, be said to have reached Buxtehude and Bach through his teaching and compositions: He was not only the founder of the true fugue but a splendid player and teacher whose profound influence on northern European keyboard music particularly lasted long after his death.

Sweelinck's extant keyboard outputcomprises some 70 pieces, of which 14 are represented here in an original sequence of alternating toccatas, fantasias and variation sets. The precise instrument for which each of the pieces was written cannot always be determined with certainty. While the song variations suit either harpsichord or virginal, the fantasias and toccatas may well have been played on whatever keyboard instrument was to hand, including the organ.

Especially in his Variation pieces on popular songs such as ‘More Palatino’ and ‘Onder een linde groen’. Sweelinck shows himself as one of the supreme masters of the form. He retains the structure of his themes throughout each set, but his mastery and inventiveness is shown in the shaping of the inner structures of each variation. The complexity of polyphony can change overthe course of one single variation, and the sets as a whole make use of the whole spectrum of compositional structures, from the most plain to the most elaborate.

The Italian pianist Andrea Vivanet takes a historically informed approach to Sweelinck’s music on the piano. He incorporates graceful ornamentation, and stylistic features necessitated by the limits of early keyboards, but he also takes full advantage of the expressive and coloristic capabilities of the modern instrument. His previous recordings have displayed a refined and imaginative approach to 20th-century composers such as Ravel and Shostakovich, but Vivanet brings a welcome precision of touch to Sweelinck that makes him sound at home on the piano.

A unique and imaginative collection newly recorded by a recent star of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition. Anna Geniushene’s fresh; layered; and powerful interpretations won her a worldwide following at the 2022 edition of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition; where she took Silver Medal with a stunning account of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto which the critic for Gramophone compared in its power and nuance to Van Cliburn himself.

Born in Moscow; Anna Geniushene pursued graduate studies in London and now lives in Lithuania with her husband; the pianist Lukas Geniusas. In her own booklet introduction; she explains the inspiration for this quirky collection of instrumental lullabies. The Berceuse is ‘associated with tenderness; care; purest love; and the most sensitive moments in our lives.’ She dedicates the album to her two young sons. Perhaps the most celebrated Berceuse of all; by Chopin; is missing; because it was Anna Geniushene’s particular wish to find and share neglected examples of the genre; even by well-known composers. Debussy composed the Berceuse heroique during the First World War as a tribute to the soldiers on the Western Front. The Berceuse Elegiaque of Busoni is better known in its orchestral guise. The brief Berceuse by Hindemith; unpublished in his lifetime; ‘draws listeners’ attention by its utterly eloquent and typically sarcastic character; which has nothing in common with traditional lullabies.’ The sheer diversity of composers makes for a continually varied sequence. George Crumb evokes a magical night-time stillness with a minimum of notes. Mompou’s Berceuse is likewise remarkable for its distilled serenity; whereas the examples by Granados; John Field and Liszt bring comfort with more Romantically moulded melodies in the tradition of Chopin. Anna Geniushene closes the album with two Russian Berceuses; by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky; lyrical; simple and utterly beguiling in her hands.

A wide-ranging introduction to the distinctive compositional voice of Amy Beach through her solo piano music, featuring both well-known and unfamiliar pieces. While Amy Beach is now among the best-known female composers of classical music history, her story becomes more remarkable as details of it are disseminated. The pianist Mark Viner introduces her life and music in a detailed but approachable essay to accompany this new recording of her piano music on Piano Classics. She was essentially self-taught, and a prodigy to match any previous celebrated male examples, at least in technica l terms. She translated Berlioz's treatise on orchestration in order to use it herself. She became a formidably accomplished pianist in her own right, but was then prevented from giving more than two recitals a year by her husband. Beach continued to compose, however, and steadly so through the last decade of the 19th century and well into the 20th. The earliest piece on Martina Frezzotti's recital is also one of her most familiar, the nocturne Dreaming from 1892, in which she emulates a Chopin model with piano writing that's deceptively simple on the page but uniquely haunting on the ear. The album's most substantial work is the 25-minute Variations on Balkan Themes, from 1904. The four themes in question were passed on to her by a missionary to the region, and the piece amounts to a proud cry for Serbian nationalism in the post-Lisztian style. Through it's course, Beach writes in the style of a barcarolle, a parlour waltz, a funeral march, a Hungarian dance and much more, weaving together her material with a sure hand. Beach's own skill as a pianist surely contributes to the soft tonal shades she conjures in her transcription of Richard Strauss's song St�ndchen. She also explored the possibilities of making accurate musical transcriptions of birdsong decades before Olivier Messiaen did so, and her most celebrated work in this vein is the achingly beautiful Hermit-Thrush at Eve from 1922. Martina Frezzotti's album of Fanny Mendelssohn for Piano Classics (PCL10238) won enthusiastic praise from David Hurwitz on a video review for Classics Today. According to pianodao. Com (Andrew Eales), 'Frezzotti proves a brilliant advocate for these pieces in this recording, combining a poetic sensibility with the necessary weight and flair to showcase the more dazzling elements of Mendelssohn's piano writing. The recording is bright, reverberant and luminous.

'His music tastes good': this was Debussy's tribute to the art of Deodat de Severac (1872-1921). Goodness and love are words that recur frequently when speaking of Severac, so much so that the pianist Blanche Selva - his teacher and biographer - wrote: 'The soul of Severac's music is love, because true love, in reality, is an aspiration, a cry, a caress of goodness.' Born in Apulia, a graduate of the conservatoire in Bari, Serena Valluzzi now gives recitals across Europe, while engaged as professor of piano at the conservatoire in Foggia. This album of Deodat de Severac marks her debut on Piano Classics, and is distinguished with the sensitive musicianship which won her prizes at the Busoni International Piano Competition and elsewhere. Descended from an ancient Languedoc family, related on his mother's side to the Aragons of Spain, Severac received his first music lessons from his painter father. He studied and worked further afield, becoming a friend and assistant to Isaac Albeniz, but his heart and his musical language remained rooted in his native Languedoc. Thus he was inspired to write en Languedoc, premiered by his friend (and Ravel's) Riccardo Vines in 1905. Impressionism meets folkloric colour and melody in the five movements of en Languedoc, evoking a lakeside reverie, a horseback gallop, a village feast and a profound elegy. This 'Coin de cimetiere au printemps' (Cemetery Corner in Spring) is one of his most inspired works: his friend Alfred Cortot admired it's 'resignation and ardour, tenderness and bitterness', with 'a long, slow melody that expands in all it's religious fervour and inconsolable melancholy.' Cerdana is another vividly picturesque five-movement suite, cousin to the likes of Albeniz's Iberia and Granados' Goyescas, deserving recognition alongside them as a major cycle of Franco-Spanish impressionism from the early 20th century. Serena Valluzzi completes this illuminating introduction to the art of Deodat de Severac with a teasingly allusive portrait in sound of bathers in the sun, 'Baigneuses au soleil', from 1908. - Deodat de Severac was a French composer whose work represents a bridge between the impressionist styles of Debussy and Ravel and the traditional music of southern France. Born in the Languedoc region, Severac's music is deeply rooted in the cultural and musical heritage of the French countryside, particularly the Occitan tradition. His piano music, while often categorized alongside the impressionists, is distinguished by it's rich evocation of regional landscapes and folk elements, making it uniquely vibrant and evocative. - This new recording presents the beautiful Baigneuses au Soleil, the suite en Languedoc, and the suite Cerdana. These compositions are marked by a lyrical sensitivity and a deep connection to nature, often eschewing the complex harmonic language of his contemporaries in favor of a more direct, folk-inspired style. - Despite his relatively small output, Severac's piano music is celebrated for it's warmth and ability to transport listeners to the idyllic landscapes that inspired him. His work remains an important, if somewhat underappreciated, contribution to early 20th-century French music, offering a refreshing contrast to the urban-centric themes prevalent in much of the music of his time. - Played with great sensitivity and feeling for colors by young Italian pianist Serena Valluzzi, winner of the Premio Alkan and prize winner of the Busoni and Casagrande competitions.

Ekaterina Litvintseva began playing the piano at the age of four; and studied music from 1994 to 2001 at the Children's Music School in the remote Russian town of Anadyr; on the Bering Straits. At 15; her family moved to Moscow; and she attended the State Chopin Music School. Having since moved to Europe; she has become much admired for her performances and recordings of Romantic classics by Chopin; Brahms and Rachmaninoff; though she has also explored the work of lesser-known composers from the period such as the Croatian pioneer Dora Pejacevic (PCL10226). The present release marks her second recording of the Chopin concertos; made in the Czech town of Pardubice in October 2022; and it completes her recorded survey of the composer’s works for piano and orchestra after the Piano Classics album of the lesser-known Variations on Mozart; Fantasia; Krakowiak and Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise.

Litvintseva has extensive experience of working with conductor Vahan Mardirossian: ‘We are a perfect team,’ she says. ‘For me; if you want to express your feelings in the deepest way as a pianist; you have to learn the music of Chopin. This is a unique opportunity for me; being able to re-record the concertos six years later; and I have re-thought many aspects of my interpretations. I think I have something to say in this music. It flows so naturally; and it’s written in a brilliant style shared by many other composers of Chopin’s day; but only he could also bring such poetic expression to the brilliance. My job is not to destroy the music with artificial intervention; but to let it flow through my mind and through my hands. I simply want listeners to be touched by this music.’

Mark Viner’s survey of the complete solo piano music of Alkan continues to turn up discoveries and reveal previously little-known or misunderstood sides of a protean figure in late French romanticism. Viner himself regards Alkan as ‘the most enigmatic figure in the history of music as a whole’.

The sixth volume of his survey focuses not on the grand cycles which have won this series such uniformly glowing reviews, but on sketches and miniatures which demonstrate Alkan’s capacity to charm as well as astound and dazzle his listeners. All these pieces are further illuminated, as before, by his own comprehensive booklet notes. Several of them will be unfamiliar to all except the most dedicated of Alkan connoisseurs.

One of the better known pieces included here, the Toccatina Op. 75, can be counted among Alkan’s finest shorter pieces for the piano, demanding phenomenal dexterity and lightness of touch. At the other end of the expressive scale, Désir is a little fantasy, one of Alkan’s most homely-sounding miniatures, yet still colored by his characteristic use of the ninth.

Death and suffering are the themes that concern every person born into this world. The way in which the individual comes to terms with these issues (or fails to do so) determines his attitude towards life, whether consciously or unconsciously … This is the subject matter underlying my composition Lamentate. Accordingly, I have written a lament – not for the dead, but for the living, who have to deal with these issues for themselves. This was how composer Arvo Pärt referred to his largest instrumental work to date and these are precisely the questions – death and suffering – which run through this recording.

Pärt, born in 1935 in Paide (Estonia), knows what he is talking about: harassed by the Soviet authorities who branded his art as over-modern and excessively religious, he underwent a profound personal crisis that led him to unfathomable suffering, reclusion and an end to his first phase of composition. As part of his subsequent artistic resurrection in the mid-nineteen seventies, he began to produce music which he defined as «tintinnabuli», inspired by the pealing of bells and based on sacred texts, mostly in Latin or in the Slavic language used in Orthodox church liturgy. Pärt himself described his style as follows: " … I must search for unity … everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me".

REVIEW:

The pianist Pedro Piquero studied in his home country of Spain and then the US. He has pursued a dual career of pianist and translator, producing definitive editions of foundational texts of Zen Buddhism and in 2017 becoming a Buddhist monk. This search for spiritual wisdom and transcendence makes him a performer of rare insight when addressing the music of Pärt.

-- Classical Music Daily

Previous albums on Piano Classics by Leonardo Pierdomenico have won enthusiastic praise from the international critics. Of his debut Liszt recital including the Csardas macabre (PCL10151), Fanfare noted: 'scrupulous performances, featuring exceptional textural clarity and rhythmic resilience, coupled with an often striking attention to harmonic nuance.' Gramophone awarded it Editor's Choice: 'His highly developed technique and cultivated sound, both adaptable to a variety of effects, are wedded to those twin essentials for artistic Liszt playing: imagination combined with thoroughgoing, scrupulous musicality.' Such qualities illuminate his new recording of the Piano Concerto by Dvor�k, made in the Czech Republic with an orchestra who live and breathe the composer's music. One of his most neglected works, the Piano Concerto requires particularly devoted advocacy as well as formidable virtuosity to overcome the technical shortcomings of Dvor�k's piano writing, but the effort is rewarded with episodes of no less ardent lyricism than the high points of his concertos for violin and cello. The Piano Concerto, however, burns with a ferocity all it's own, more similar in that regard to Schumann's impassioned writing for soloist and orchestra. The unusual pairings draw on the talents of the Pardubice orchestra's front desks, with two equally unfamiliar concertante miniatures by Dvor�k, the Mazurek for violin and orchestra (dedicated to Pablo de Sarasate) and the Rondo for cello and orchestra intended for Hanus Wihan, who would in time inspire Dvor�k to compose the Cello Concerto. Thus the album will complete a Dvor�k concerto collection on CD as well as offering a further demonstration of Leonardo Pierdomenico's artistry.

Beginning in 1838, Franz Liszt began to produce transcriptions of Schubert's Lieder almost as rapidly as they had been written in the first place. Within eight years, Liszt had produced 56 such transcriptions, which are models of their kind: faithful, ingenious and gratifying to play.

As the great pianist of his own age, Liszt rewrote the Wanderer Fantasy in an act of homage, firstly as a concerto, then a solo piece, and this lesser-known version is recorded here by Giovanni Doria Miglietta.

Finally, Doria-Miglietta includes Liszt’s more complex rewritings of two Impromptus. In D899 No.2 he does indeed make the harmony more complex and the effect more brilliant, whereas he leaves the divine simplicity of No.3 almost untouched except for changing the key from G flat to G major, perhaps to make it easier to play for the amateur pianist.

New recordings of large-scale but little-known works by one of Beethoven's most influential students. Born like his teacher-to-be in the German city of Bonn, Ferdinand Ries studied with Beethoven in Vienna for several years during the first decade of the 19th century. He also worked for Beethoven as a copyist and secretary, and in 1838, shortly before his own death at the age of 53, published the first authoritative account of his master's life. But Ries was far more than a mere amanuensis, as a series of releases on Brilliant Classics has documented, with valuable modern recordings of solo, chamber and instrumental music. Ries's own instrument was naturally the piano, and his catalogue of works for the instrument spans light-hearted miniatures and ambitiously scaled, dramatic sonatas, much as Beethoven's did. In the latter category falls the Grande Sonata Fantasia which Ries composed in 1811 (the same year as Beethoven's Seventh Symphony). It is easy enough to hear the turbulent textures and melodic shapes of his teacher's famous 'Pathetique' Sonata in the background, but Ries could exercise his own imagination, which in any case was shaped by travel far beyond the lands around Vienna, unlike Beethoven. The weight of the sonata's singular form falls on the huge Presto finale, making considerable demands on the artist, which Gianluca Faragli conquers with the aid of a superbly conditioned modern Fazioli piano. The sonata's designation as a 'fantasia' indicates that Ries was anticipating the Romantic era's preoccupation with personal expression as the over-riding concern of creative art, and Faragli has coupled Op.26 with three more fantasies. Two of them are based on themes from Mozart's 'Marriage of Figaro': display pieces, but by no means frivolous, any more than the darker subject of Schiller's poem 'Resignation' which inspired Ries to compose one of his most inwardly affecting works, written in the south London suburb of Clapham in 1821. In a lighter vein, Faragli adds the gypsy-style Introduction and Rondo composed once Ries had returned to Vienna with his English wife and three children. Thus the album surveys the course of Ries's creative life, as the pianist Alessandro Taverna elucidates in a detailed booklet essay. - Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838) was born in Bonn and moved to Vienna in 1801, where his life became closely related to that of Ludwig van Beethoven (also a native of Bonn.). Ries studied piano with him, copied his scores and was the interpreter of several new works, notably the premiere of the Third Piano Concerto. Ries also wrote the first biography of Beethoven, an invaluable source of first-hand information. - Ries' style inevitably is modeled on that of his master Beethoven, he was however strong enough to stand on his own. Ries also enjoyed a brilliant career as a virtuoso pianist. "Ries is rightly celebrated as one of the finest piano performers of the present day", a London reviewer declared. "His hand is powerful and his manner confident and often surprising. But it is his way of playing that makes him stand out from all the others, above all for his romantic wildness". - This new recording presents original piano works by Ries: the substantial "Grande Sonata Fantasia "L'Infortunee", Op.26, a Fantasia on Schiller's pem Resignation, a Fantasia on Mozart's Nozze Di Figaro and an exciting Introduction and Rondo Zingaresco. Music of great pianistic invention and instrumental brilliance! - Played by the young Italian pianist Gianluca Faragli on a modern instrument.

The first volume of Sebastian Stanley’s Albéniz survey was greeted with enthusiasm for the repertoire and praise for the interpretations in the pages of Fanfare and elsewhere: ‘He is tender and sentimental in the lyrical moments, animated and energetic in his attack elsewhere. He clearly loves the music, and dispatches it with unapologetic flair.’ His sequel opens with the First Suite Española which contains several of the composer’s most colourful and best-known pieces. It begins with the vibrant guitar-strumming textures and Moorish harmonies of ‘Granada (Serenata)’ and continues with his own interpretation of a dance from his native Catalonia. Evocations of Seville, Cadiz and Asturias all spring from the pages with the sharp colours of a Goya canvas, and the suite comes to an exotic, sensuous conclusion with a Cuban habanera. The Second Suite Española is much smaller and less well-known. Its two movements are evocations of Zaragoza and (once more) Seville. Sebastian Stanley includes two further landscapes in sound: the Zambra granadina (Danse orientale) evokes flamenco dance that features a haunting melody to a seductively syncopated accompaniment. The rolled chords of Cádiz (Gaditana) suggest the strumming of guitars, setting the scene for an animated copla dance. The neoclassical side of Albéniz comes to the fore with the third of his Suites Anciennes – consisting of a graceful Minuet and sprightly Gavotte – which anticipate similar projects to revive Baroque forms in modern guise by Ravel and Respighi. As a reminder of the incomparable richness of the finest Spanish piano music,’ Sebastian Stanley’s Albéniz series should invite the attention of curious listeners and pianophiles alike.

Born in 1985, the Italian pianist Maria Argentiero gained an enthusiastic online following during lockdown with her streamed performances of repertoire from Haydn to Satie, Kapustin and beyond. She teaches in Rome and specializes as a performer in quirkier voices from the past century such as Tansman. The booklet features a thorough profile of the composer and his piano music, plus an interview between Maria Argentiero and Marianne Tansman, the composer’s daughter, who recalls him as a ‘very loving but very anxious’ father. Alexander Tansman (1897-1986) was born in Lodz, Poland, into a wealthy Jewish family of great culture. He spoke 5 languages and studied law and philosophy. His early compositions show experiments with atonality and 12-tone music. In 1919 he left Poland for Paris, where he settled permanently.

Tansman: “I spent the first twenty years of my life in Poland. In regard to the importance of Slavic influence in my music, I can readily say that I followed the same path as Bartók or Manuel de Falla: folklore imaginé. I did not use popular themes per se. I used, however, their general melodic contour. This folklore remained strongly present in my musical sensitivity.”

One could say that Tansman had a similar approach to writing music as Chopin – namely to use folklore as source material to be transformed by his imagination, without actual quoting. In a similar vein he used the different traditions he encountered when travelling round the globe, no matter whether it was jazz, gamelan or Japanese music. This new recording presents a selection of piano music by Tansman: the jazzy Sonatine Transatlantique, Trois Préludes en forme de blues, and the cycle La Tour du monde en miniature, delightful and vibrant musical depictions of places from all over the world.

Vincent d’Indy's massive Piano Sonata, published in 1907, demands the technique of a virtuoso performer, and rewards close attention no less than better-known examples such as the no less ambitious works from the same time by Dukas and Lekeu. The first movement unfolds as a huge and chromatic set of theme and variations, in which d’Indy’s avowed Wagnerism continually blurs tonal boundaries and erupts into distant keys.

Even larger – almost 20 minutes in length – is the finale, which seems to pick up where the eventful narrative of the first movement left off, presenting a theme which, if not modernist in its development, embraces distant realms with hardly less enthusiasm than the contemporary music of Scriabin. It is left to the central Scherzo to afford some brief and light relief, but even here the angular features of the outer movements recur.

Any seeker of piano rarities and enthusiast for the likes of Alkan and Medtner will want to make the acquaintance of D’Indy’s Piano Sonata, especially in a performance as accomplished as this recording by the young Italian pianist Sofia Andreoli. Her pairing for D’Indy’s Sonata is hardly less original: the set of Promenades composed by Albéric Magnard in 1893.

Magnard was 28 at the time, yet this suite of tone-pictures is hardly ‘youthful’ in tone. Rather, it too belongs to the heady world of French Wagnerism, exploratory and reflective in tone even as its composer wanders the streets of Paris, past the Bois de Boulogne, the Eglise Saint-Germain and the Trianon, before finding its destination in the forest of Rambouillet on the southern edge of the city. There, glinting half-lights and arboreal silence take the listener back to a space of tranquillity, inviting discovery by any adventurous explorer of the late-Romantic piano.

An Italian disciple of Liszt, Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914) was once chiefly for his once-popular transcription of the Melodie from Gluck’s Orphée ed Euridice. His own music has only begun receiving sustained attention in the last couple of decades, and Gaia Federica Caporiccio’s projected complete survey is only the second such project to reach completion. The first volume of the survey (PCL10216) met with a warm critical welcome. According to Fanfare magazine, ‘Gaia Federica Caporiccio plays with a winsome freshness, offering some finely shaped melodies and some insightful rubato.’ Caporiccio now turns to some of the collections which most betray the influence of Schumann on Sgambati’s style, or at least they share the German composer’s capriciously divided personality.

The eight pieces of Fogli Volanti (Flying Pages) Op.12 begin with a Romanza which could almost have strayed from the pages of Kinderszenen, but then Sgambati reveals his hand, and his Italian origins, in a gently swaying Canzonetta. The simplicity of the following Idyll is likewise Sgambati’s own, and a fine balance between German and Italian influences continues to mark the suite until the concluding festivities of its ‘Campane a festa’. On a miniature scale – the six movements lasting hardly more than a miniature each – the Fantasie Alpestri return to Sgambati’s origins, or at least an idealised, rural version of them. The ghostly presence of Schumann once more surges up between the semiquavers in the opening Prelude of the Quattro pezzi di seguito before a kind of commedia dell’arte spirit takes over in the ‘Vecchio menuetto’. The slow movement of the suite is supplied by ‘Nenia’, taking its name from an old Roman funeral song.

The Mélodies poetiques are cast in a lighter vein, whereas the five-movement Suite Op.21 finds Sgambati at his most Lisztian, with rippling figuration to test out any virtuoso pianist. Gaia Federica Caporiccio’s pianism and dedication is restoring the name of Sgambati to a measure of wider renown; her own booklet essay completes a labour of love which will make essential listening for any piano collector.

While Liszt’s version of 12 songs from Winterreise is the crowning glory of his Schubert transcriptions, there are surprisingly few recordings of the complete set. Only two are presently available (one on fortepiano), making this new recording by Leonardo Pierdomenico a notable event, and coupled uniquely with two versions of Liszt’s own music.

Leonardo Pierdomenico brings Lisztian virtues to the songs from Winterreise which Liszt selected and arranged according to his own ordering, beginning like the original with ‘Gute Nacht’ but ending with the grim tavern scene of ‘Im Dorfe’. Along the journey, Liszt exercises all his powers of pianistic invention not merely to incorporate the song line within the piano part but to enrich Schubert’s music with his own sympathetic interpretation. In Der Lindenbaum, Liszt he deploys all manner of flourishes to conjure up the tree’s rustling leaves. In a surprising twist, he follows it with the cycle’s otherwordly song evoking Der Leiermann, the hurdy-gurdy man.

The recital’s still central point of reflection is supplied by Liszt’s transcription of Gretchen from his Faust Symphony: a loving but complex portrait of the object of Faust’s affections, a cantabile meditation magnificently sustained over almost 20 minutes. By contrast, Totentanz in its solo-piano version is a feat of pianistic imagination, based on the Dies Irae plainchant, to test the most technically assured performers. Authoritative notes by the pianist and scholar Mark Viner complete a set sure to draw the interest of all Lisztians.

The young Italian pianist has already established himself as a Lisztian of renown and distinction through the Piano Classics album (PCL10151) including the Ballades, Legendes, and Csardas macabre. The album won widespread critical admiration: ‘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.’ (Gramophone, September 2018).

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.

The third volume Ciro Longobardi's Messiaen, after the universal critical success of Volumes 1 & 2, focusing on the composer's best-loved piano cycle. With his Piano Classics collection of the Preludes, Quatre etudes de rythme, La fauvette des jardins and other shorter works, Ciro Longobardi announced himself as a Messiaen pianist of remarkable imagination and accomplishment. The critics duly took note: 'Longobardi showcases tremendous technical skill and an exceptional attentiveness. This album is a lush, intricate success-meaningful for Messiaen enthusiasts and enjoyable for those new to his work. I highly recommend it.' (Fanfare). The Catalogue d'oiseaux continued to attract superlatives: 'Hs performance makes you listen, through it's diverse use of dynamics and the expert use of silences. His playing is concise and bright and is best listened to with the accompanying booklet, in which his notes on the music expertly set the scene.' (MusicWeb International). Now the Italian pianist turns to the Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus in which Messiaen most successfully synthesised a Lisztian tradition of virtuosity and tone-painting on the piano with his own spiritual and musical preoccupations: Catholic devotion, birdsong and Indian rhythmic syntax among them. Messiaen had lately completed what became a 'Tristan' trilogy of works including the Turangalila Symphony when, in 1948, he was commissioned by French radio to write pieces to accompany a broadcast of Christmas-themed poetry. The commission quickly outgrew it's original purpose, and Messiaen instead created a thematically unified cycle of pieces taking in contemplations of monumental reverence, jazz-inflected improvisations, fabulously intricate toccatas and more. At the heart of Vingt Regards lies the ineffable tenderness of the kiss bestowed on the sleeping infant by his mother in the most famous piece of the cycle, Le baiser de l'enfant Jesus. As a generous pairing, Ciro Longobardi also includes the 1985 cycle of piano miniatures, Petites Esquisses d'Oiseaux, which distil his lifelong love of birdsong into six exquisite portraits. These, like the Vingt Regards, are dedicated to his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who inspired his piano writing throughout his mature career, bringing a cyclical unity of it's own to the album.

While we associate Tchaikovsky with music of virtuoso power and difficulty, sweeping up audiences with the fire of the Violin Concerto and First Piano Concerto, he also applied himself to music for the ever-growing market of amateur music-makers during his lifetime. Like many other great composers, he knew how to write for musicians of moderate ability without compromising or simplifying the individuality of his voice as a composer. Also like many great composers, regularly finding himself in grim financial prospects, he tapped into a reliable source of income by supplying publishers who had a seemingly limitless market for music composed with amateur musicians in mind, especially by the acknowledged masters of their day. Both of the cycles recorded here by Yuan Sheng were produced for this market, comprising short pieces, most of them quite simple on the page, but thoroughly imbued with quintessentially Tchaikovskian qualities.

As part of his Piano Classics discography, Yuan Sheng recorded The Seasons – Tchaikovsky’s best known solo piano cycle – in 2017. The album was widely welcomed for its serious approach to music which is too often treated trivially. Likewise, he invests these cycles with an authentic delicacy of touch and gravity of expression – in Tchaikovsky, tears are never very far away.

Back in 2015, Fanfare singled out Ekaterina Litvintseva's first solo album of Rachmaninoff, including the Moments musicaux Op.16, as an 'impressive outing. Her playing is tonally rich and extremely thoughtful.' Since then, she has assembled an impressive and critically acclaimed catalogue on Piano Classics, including most recently the great Trio elegiaque which Rachmaninoff wrote in memory of Tchaikovsky: 'an attractive and valuable disc' (Fanfare). Litvintseva now turns to a trio of uncontested masterpieces by the Russian composer, demonstrating within a single album the range of his stylistic evolution over the course of 40 years. He was still a teenager, studying at the Moscow Conservatoire, when he wrote his First Piano Concerto in 1891. On the instruction of his teachers, he took the Grieg Concerto as a model, and poured his own invention into it: a remarkably successful strategy, as it turned out, because the finished work is both strong and personal, touched with many of those fingerprints of gesture and harmony which we have come to think of as quintessentially Rachmaninoff. These include flights of lyric fantasy and equally sudden, unexpected turns towards melancholy introspection. Rachmaninoff had become an international celebrity by 1913, when he took his family to live the high life with him in Rome, at a home which Tchaikovsky had once used. In the Italian capital he began work on the imposing Second Piano Sonata, though the work had to be completed back at the family estate, Ivanovka, when his daughters came down with typhus. Rachmaninoff overhauled the Sonata in 1931, cutting and in some places simplifying it's form, and it is this version which Litvintseva plays: a stylistic bridge between mid-period and late-style in a composer whose capacity for reinvention has often been underestimated. By 1941 he was an exile living in the US and Switzerland, where he wrote his Variations on a theme of Corelli - the 'La folia' theme adopted by countless of his predecessors. Informed by decades of pianistic and creative mastery, Rachmaninoff makes the theme his own with a neoclassical severity and haunting economy of expression. Thus, taken as a whole, Ekaterina Litvintseva's new album pays a wide-ranging and personal tribute to a composer who has inspired her playing since her formation in Siberia. - Ekaterina Litvintseva is one of the most remarkable pianists of her generation. Her recordings won her enthusiastic acclaim in the international press: "a notable moment in the history of Chopin interpretation" (Fanfare); "a sense of spontaneous invention" in Mozart's K.271 (Gramophone) and "an expressive depth" in Brahms's 1st Piano Concerto (BBC Music Magazine). She previously recorded for Piano Classics an album with piano works by Dora Pejacevic (PCL10226), as well as the Works for Piano and Orchestra by Chopin (PCL10142 and 10274), which was a CD Of The Week at Classic FM. - In this new release Litvintseva displays her innate feeling for the idiom in works by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): the youthfully exuberant First Piano Concerto, the monumental Second Piano Sonata and the innovative Corelli variations Op. 42, cornerstones of the piano repertoire nowadays, and played with vigour, drama and a deep sense of poetry. The concerto is accompanied by the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, conducted by Vahan Mardirossian.

Two major contemporary Japanese composers, writing for the piano with vivid imagery and brightly piercing harmony. Born in Osaka in 1953, Akira Nishimura is one of Japan’s most distinguished living composers, extensively performed and recorded, though many of those albums are unavailable internationally. He has contributed to all the major classical genres including opera. There is a slow but irresistible momentum to the pull of his harmony in most of his orchestral works which is shared by the trio of pieces recorded by Lucas Huisman.

Nishimura’s Mirror of Star (1992) is a musical picture of the night sky which imbues the melody line with subtle echo effects, like a halo of reverberation: ‘calm on the surface but obsessional anxiety deeper down,’ according to the composer. Two years later, he completed a set of three Visions for piano, titled of Aqua, Flame, and Invoker. Flame uses only the bottom ten notes of the piano, glowing with overtones like Mirror of Star. Aqua is inspired by the river Ganges and the rituals of burial which take place on its waters, while Invoker is a prayer using the technique of heterophony which overlays subtly different versions of the same melody. Finally, from 1987, Carillons of Ekstasis also makes extensive use of the piano’s lower register as well as the top octave to evoke the starry heavens and the gap between them and us.

Born in 1986, Keitaro Takahashi has studied and worked in both his native Japan and in Europe (especially Switzerland), and his music fulfils an ambition to integrate those disparate cultures by employing instrumental, electronic, or environmental sounds according to East Asian philosophies and concepts. Furin evokes a traditional Japanese wind chime made of glass or pottery in a sound portrait of a Japanese summer which is gently distanced by preparing the piano with rubber tuning mutes. From 2014, Ryouka also uses a prepared piano in a tone portrait of the towering mountain ridges of the Tateyama range and in particular a painting of them by the Hiroshima-born artist Genso Okuda. Shikkun (2018, rev 2022) is scored for piano four hands; like Ryouka, the title is a neologism coined by Takahashi to describe a state of simultaneous motion and stillness which he came up with on a mountain bike-ride in Japan

Contemporary piano music by two leading Japanese composers: Keitaro Takahashi and Akira Nishimura, a fascinating journey of unheard sounds, harmonies, colours and timbres. Keitaro Takahashi born 1986 in Tokyo, is a Japanese composer, media artist, and programmer. He currently is a research fellow at CeReNeM (Center for Research in New Music) at the University of Huddersfield in the UK. With his artistic background established both in Japan and Switzerland, his artistic interests as a composer mainly focus on creating musical gestures and acoustic associations under the concept of the morphology of sound textures and the mixture of various compositional techniques such as Heterophony, Micropolyphony, and Micro montage music.

Akira Nishimura was born in Osaka in 1953. He studied composition and music theory at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. While studying contemporary Western compositional techniques, he also developed a strong interest in traditional Asian music, religion, aesthetics, cosmology, etc. which led him to develop the concept of heterophony and other forms of music. His works won many prizes, among which the ExxonMobil Music Prize, Queen Elizabeth International Music Composition Competition and the Luigi Dallapiccola Composition Award. 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 (PCLD0119) and recorded this monumental piece for solo piano on the Piano Classics label, for which he also recorded the piano music by Takemitsu (PCL10147), which was nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. He also recorded Michael Finnissy’s Gershwin Arrangements (PCL10218).

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.

Bernard Van Dieren (1887-1936) was essentially self-taught as a composer, though friendships with Schoenberg, Busoni, Sorabji, Walton, and Lambert all obliquely indicate by association both the technical confidence of his work as well as the variegated colors of his harmonic palette.

He was born in Rotterdam but fell in love with and then married a pupil of Busoni’s, Frida Kindler, who gave the first performances of most of his piano music. While earlier works such as the powerful Toccata approach Schoenbergian atonality in their tightly woven chromaticism, Van Dieren’s world is at root a diatonic one, stretching rather than breaking tonalities with a post-Wagnerian sensibility often comparable to the music of Delius. The composer himself was apparently a pianist of modest ability, but (perhaps not least thanks to Frida Kindler) he writes for the instrument with a formidable array of pianistic technique grounded in his own enduring love of counterpoint.

The most straightforwardly appealing music here is a set of 12 Dutch folk melodies on album 2, followed by a charming little prelude written for Frida’s birthday in 1934 – his last piano work before his death from a long-standing kidney complaint two years later. The pianist Christopher Guild, renowned for his advocacy of lesser-known pianistic voices, is then joined by Dr James Reid-Baxter for the first-ever recording of the Ballad de Villon, in which Van Dieren originally set a prayer to the Virgin for reciter and string quartet, with the instrumental lines later transcribed for the piano by Philip Heseltine. Album 1 features a set of six densely polyphonic ‘Sketches’ in the style of Busoni and a Theme and Variations in the grand Romantic manner.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was born in Hamburg in November 1805, the eldest of four siblings (the second was Felix, followed by Rebecca and Paul). The Mendelssohn family, of Jewish lineage, and belonging in the upper bourgeois class, gave a brilliant cultural education to their four children. Fanny was not only an exceptional pianist, but also an exceptional composer; her style is very close to that of Felix, the best known of her siblings. Her output is rich and substantial and includes more than four hundred pieces, comprising Lieder, organ works, chamber music, cantatas, an oratorio and an orchestral overture. In spite of her prolific creative output, some of her works remain still unpublished. This album focuses on a part of her piano works written between 1838 and 1841, which are particularly interesting.

The piano cycle Das Jahr (The Year) (1841) is the main work of this collection, written during her Italian journey. It is made up of twelve pieces, each bearing the name of a month, plus an epilogue, each expressing the particular feelings and atmosphere of the month in question. There are many thematic cross references between the pieces, as well as numerous references to Bach, connected to the music typical for the Lutheran worship. Also included are the two Nocturnes and the Introduction and Capriccio in B minor, in which the influence of her brother Felix is particularly evident. Italian pianist Martina Frezzotti studied with Lazar Berman at the Piano Academy of Imola and later with Elisso Virsaladze at the prestigious Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where she obtained her Doctorate in Music with full marks in 2012, the first Italian in history of this prestigious university.