Deeply felt new recordings of these landmarks in Romantic piano literature on a modern Steinway grand, by an Italian artist with an active interest in the lineage of piano history. On recordings for Piano Classics ranging from Beethoven to Alkan and beyond, the Italian pianist Vincenzo Maltempo has demonstrated a deeply informed understanding of Romantic piano literature, both in the nuts and bolts of it's composition and in the field of it's reception. According to a Fanfare review for album of Schumann, 'This impressive young Italian pianist displays a great love and dedication towards this music. Maltempo, who was born in 1985, begins with smouldering technique, no surprise for someone who has made a name for himself as a fearless interpreter of the briar-patch scores of Alkan. ' In his own booklet introduction to his latest recording, Maltempo explores the nature of a Chopin tradition, as handed down to us from accounts of the composer's own playing, his instructions to his students, and then the early recordings made by renowned interpreters such as Cortot and Pugno. 'What their recordings share is a relatively free or liberal interpretation of elements in the score that are now treated more rigidly. Their application of rubato is more subtle, their pedal technique does not cloud the sound but clarifies melodies and harmonies. They communicate a wide and infinitely varied dynamic range, and a diaphanous warmth of phrasing, without falling into mannerism or "sentimentality". ' These qualities, therefore, are the guiding lights to his own playing of the Nocturnes. Maltempo has chosen to record them on an 1888 Steinway piano, distinguished by the clarity of articulation which has always been a Steinway hallmark, but bestowing on these quintessential pieces of nocturnal poetry a softer and more rounded palette than we are accustomed to find on modern pianos. These recordings are, in the best possible sense, 'historically informed', without being bound either to the barline or to doctrinal notions of a 'correct' Chopin performance. They are, instead, as free and as personal, yet as imbued with the inner spirit of the score, as it seems the composer wished to find in his performers. - Any new recording of the complete Nocturnes by Frederic Chopin rouses the interest: in the field of countless existing recordings, does the pianist have something new to say? Inspired by but not imitating the great masters of the Golden Piano Age, Vincenzo Maltempo presents the Nocturnes as dramatic tone poems with a strong narrative, based on the art of rhetoric and Belcanto. As a means to the expression of his ideas, he found an 1888 Steinway grand with an exceptionally wide dynamic range and singing tone. The result is an enervating and moving journey through these eternal masterpieces! - Italian pianist Vincenzo Maltempo, one of the most interesting pianists of the young generation, made his name in his staggering recordings of unjustly forgotten romantic repertoire: Transcendental Studies by Lyapunov (Piano Classics, PCL0124) received 5 stars in several classical magazines (a. o. The French Diapason). His recording of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies received rave reviews, a Gramophone Editor's Choice: "extraordinary breadth and nobility... little short of perfection... ", "9/9, close to ideal" (Jed Distler Classicstoday. Com). His recordings of Alkan have "confirmed his place in the restricted circle of Alkan's best performers, 5 stars" (Diapason), "Exhilarating, thrillingly demonic, 5 Stars" (Andrew Clement in The Guardian).

According to the impresario Salomon, had George Frederick Pinto not died at the age of 21, 'England would have had the honor of producing a second Mozart.' Early in 1806 he probably succumbed to the effects of tuberculosis, much exacerbated by a dissolute lifestyle; Pinto's 'very questionable character, his habits of intemperance, and his somewhat lax principles,' were notorious to his contemporaries. And yet despite the praise of Salomon and Samuel Wesley, who remarked that 'a greater musical Genius has not been known', Pinto's music fell into obscurity, only to be revived in the 1960s. Within the two or three years before his death he produced an astonishingly mature body of work centered on the instruments with which he was also a celebrated performer, the violin and the piano. Perhaps his most remarkable music is to be found in the piano sonatas recorded here by Marek Toporowski:, more particularly the two sonatas op.3 and the Grand Sonata in C minor 'Inscribed to his Friend John Field' (1803).A Fantasia and Sonata in C minor, left unfinished and completed by Wesley and W�lfl; and three sets of Variations also match up to Pinto's best standards. These works are blessed with beautiful and original ideas; although the influences of Mozart, Dussek and Cramer are clearly discernible there are many original touches, as well as astonishing anticipations of Beethoven, Schubert and even Chopin. Anyone with even a passing interest in Classical-era piano music will find Pinto's highly inventive music worth further investigation. This new recording is the first complete survey undertaken on instruments of Pinto's own time. Marek Toporowski plays three fortepianos, all of them modern copies of distinguished German models from the end of the 18th century. He also contributes a detailed booklet essay on Pinto's life and works, informed by both practical and scholarly experience as one of the Polish historical performance movement's most renowned musicians.

'There's real authority and vision' to Proshayev's Schumann," observed The Guardian on Denys Proshayev's debut album for Piano Classics in 2013: "the cleanness and clarity of his playing are hard to ignore." A second album focused on Alfred Schnittke (PCL0071), drawing the following praise from Fanfare: "A well played and well recorded programme... Proshayev and his duo partner Nadia Mokhtari really get into the spirit of the [Gogol Suite]... Proshayev has a clear tone and lucid technique. He prioritizes clarity over histrionics, yet never skimps on drama." A previous collection of Rameau also won high praise, and his latest album ingeniously unites his particular sympathy for Schnittke with his poise and imaginative tonal coloring of Baroque masters. A booklet interview reveals that it was the 'unbelievable beauty and harmonious refinement' of Rameau's music that drew Proshayev to him, despite the challenges involved in transferring a completely original and highly ornamented idiom from harpsichord to piano: 'On the modern piano, these ornaments offer such a great variety of possibilities, unimaginable nuances and so much freedom that these technical challenges at the end give place to pleasure.' Proshayev's pleasure in performance will be shared by the listener in these new recordings of the E minor Suite by Rameau, imaginatively paired with the Sixth Partita composed in the same key by Bach. For Proshayev the challenges involved in playing Bach are at least as much spiritual as technical: 'Bach's music is the quintessence of the highest concentration of emotions and spirituality.' He concludes with a piano-duet arrangement of the Suite in Olden Style which Schnittke originally composed for violin and piano as a homage to the Baroque masters, uninflected by the irony and distance characterizing some of his other 'polystylistic' experiments in music.

Alb�niz wrote seven piano sonatas during the 1880s, but only Nos. 3, 4, and 5 survive as complete works. As with so much of his output they are now better known in the form of guitar transcriptions - at least for Nos. 3 and 5 - but the piano originals show the same fantastical imagination and romantic temperament as his masterpiece Iberia, while conforming to a more conventionally Classical form. Their craftsmanship in harmony, scoring, and voice-leading are beyond reproach, but it is the lyric sweep and often playful touches of harmony that secure their place on the fringes of the repertoire. As a pianist, Alb�niz was a noted interpreter of 18th-century music - not only Bach and Scarlatti but also Handel, Couperin and Rameau - at a time when such music was often disparaged as dryly academic or old- fashioned. The Suites anciennes are an early example of musical neoclassicism, comprising suites of gavottes, minuets, sarabandes and chaconnes in his own tribute to the Baroque era. But then the minuets, rondos and well-worked counterpoint to be enjoyed in the three sonatas also belong to an earlier era. The Fourth is a particular highlight, establishing Alb�niz as the leading Spanish composer of keyboard sonatas since Antonio Soler, but the others are every bit it's equal in craftsmanship and elegance. Sebastian Stanley is a British pianist who has specialized in the piano music of Spain, making well-received recordings of the Danzas Espanolas and Goyescas by Granados. This is his debut album on Brilliant Classics, enhanced by booklet notes by the noted authority on Spanish piano music, Walter A. Clark.

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.

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.

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.

First published in 1847, these preludes form a highly original set of pieces, effectively Alkan’s first foray into the genre of cyclic shorter pieces. The set stands aside from so many in its consistently reflective and introspective approach to a genre recently redefined by Chopin. The key sequence guides us through all the major and minor keys, but instead of settling for all 24 major and minor tonalities, Alkan comes full circle for a twenty-fifth and final C major prelude to complete the set. Alkan had in mind that the Preludes might equally effectively be played on piano or organ – that they might even serve liturgical functions as chorale preludes or instrumental antiphons. However, they have always been regarded as piano music first and foremost, albeit possessed of an often tranquil and reflective temperament, anticipating the mystical works of Liszt such as the Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses (it will be remembered that Liszt regarded Alkan alone as a serious rival to his pianistic prowess). Mark Viner has made his name playing Alkan’s music, and he is widely regarded as among the composer’s most persuasive advocates on record. ‘His playing is never showy,’ remarked the Guardian when reviewing a previous Piano Classics album of the Op.35 Etudes: ‘he emphasises that these are profound explorations of early romantic sensibility first and extreme technical challenges second, and that is a totally convincing way of dealing with some of the most remarkable piano music of its time.’ Viner was praised by The Sunday Times for ‘turning Alkan’s forbidding torrents of notes into real music’. This much-anticipated new album is enhanced by Viner’s own, authoritative booklet essay giving full context both to the Preludes and their reception.

Mark Viner’s Piano Classics albums of romantic repertoire off the beaten track have attracted plenty of critical attention for their ‘sympathy and style’ as Pianist magazine summarised his recent selection of miniatures by Cecile Chaminade (PCL10164): ‘His appreciation and enjoyment of these vignettes is palpable, relishing their wit, whimsy, charm and endearing pictorial qualities.’ His latest release returns to the music of Sigismond Thalberg (1812-1871), a contemporary and serious rival of Franz Liszt. A previous Piano Classics album compiling five of Thalberg’s operatic fantasies (PCL0092) drew a glowing encomium from Gramophone for Viner’s ‘masterly’ playing: ‘His rubato is subtly, perfectly judged; the piano sings; and from Viner’s fingers the iridescent showers of notes cascade with scintillating exuberance.’ His touch and formidable technique are here put at the service of six more fantasies based on themes from operas by Auber, Bellini, Berlioz, Halevy, Mercadante and Meyerbeer. Thalberg’s fantasia on themes from Les Huguenots appeared just weeks after the opera’s premiere, yet it deftly plays with many of the principal melodies in this epic tragedy in a synthesis all the more remarkable for being written at the age of 24. Belonging to his pedagogical collection of Op.70 pieces, the transcriptions from Bellini’s Norma and Mercadante’s Il giuramento are more faithful. The fantasia on themes from Auber’s La Muette di Portici is more of a virtuoso tour de force from which Thalberg took particular pride, choosing it for his performance to Queen Victoria in June 1844. The Berlioz fantasy is based on the finale of the Grand Grande Symphonie funebre et triomphale: it provides a suitably barnstorming conclusion to a true celebration of virtuoso pianism.

" This 2CD set features a new recording of the complete Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words) by Felix Mendelssohn. These ever popular works, often of deceptively “simple” language and writing, in fact contain a wealth of moods. Hungarian master pianist Balázs Szokolay (b. 1961) has been a piano professor at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest since 1987. repertoire is wide, his discography extensive and he concertizes worldwide as both soloist and chamber musician."

A new recording of two major Reger cycles, by a fast-emerging British piano talent. 'To fathom his all-powerful might, no human may accomplish' - this is the text, from a duet in Bach's Cantata BWV128, which Reger takes as the subject of his Bach Variations, and it may fairly be advanced that Reger accorded Bach a comparably divine status. At the age of just 31, Reger had by this stage assimilated not only Bachian counterpoint but it's transformation through the ears and imaginations of Schumann and Brahms and others, and he proceeds to treat the theme with astonishing freedom, testing the technique of the performer while reaching for the limits of the theme's musical possibilities over the course of 14 variations. The cycle concludes with a mighty fugue - or fugues, on separate subjects (of Reger's own devising, eventually welded with the Bach theme). In his booklet essay, Eden Walker remarks that the final bars are 'some of the most colossal and victorious of any in the entire piano repertoire.' By contrast, as a salutary demonstration of Reger's versatility, the Traume am Kamin present him at his most relaxed and intimate, and anyone who has found it hard to warm to Reger will surely find in this cycle a delightful entry-point to an often forbidding catalogue. 'Dreams by the Fireside' - Reger's knotty chromatic harmony still underpins the progress of these Romantic sketches, but now disguised by a touch of the 'lateness' that comes over many artists towards the end of their lives or careers, whether or not they were aware of it. This cycle was Reger's final piano cycle before his death in 1916, aged 41, and the mood of the cycle is perhaps also marked by a necessary escapism from the violent bloodshed around him. Born in 1995, Eden Walker has become a specialist in the ultra-virtuoso end of Romantic piano writing at the hands of composers such as Alkan, Busoni and Godowsky (and Reger). Based in Hamburg, he now teaches at the Staatliche Jugendmusikschule, as well as furthering his own studies and giving concerts across Germany and the UK.

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.

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.

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.

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.