The only collected survey of George Benjamin’s
piano music on record, from a Dutch pianist
who specialises in new music and has worked
closely with the composer.
Benjamin was an accomplished pianist as well
as composer from his early years, and it seems
natural in retrospect that his first published
work should be the Piano Sonata he composed
in 1977-8, as a prodigious student of Olivier
Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod. Certain harmonic
touches may mark the sonata out as the work
of ‘a Messiaen pupil’ but the unsettled, leaping
gestural sense of the piece is particular to
Benjamin. So much of Benjamin’s later music is
fascinatingly prefigured here, including a sense
of timing for a gradual accumulation of tension
(‘stormy eruptions’ and ‘savage violence’ in
the composer’s words) that marks out his first
major orchestral score, Ringed by the Flat
Horizon. Underlying that sense of timing is a
feeling for dramatic gesture which has found
its natural expression in a series of operas
written during the last 20 years.
Dedicated to Loriod, Sortilèges (1981) makes
clear its French heritage in the notes as well as
the title, while the three subsequent Studies
for piano, composed over the next four years,
find Benjamin working out intricate rhythmic
problems and their solutions. Even the
Relativity Rag takes a quirky, sideways look at
its superficially familiar material. The next
piano pieces had to wait until 2001, and the
Shadowlines which Benjamin wrote for PierreLaurent Aimard. This set of six canonic preludes
takes Benjamin’s inclination to distill and pare
back to a new level, while the piano writing
itself is richer and more unselfconsciously
informed by the heritage of piano literature.
Finally, there are the Piano Figures of 2004,
written for students of the piano and
accordingly pitched at a technically lower level
than the other pieces, but no less preoccupied
with the rhythmic games and sudden swerves
of thought that are hallmarks of his most
complex music. All these pieces have been
recorded, but never by the same pianist,
making Erik Bertsch’s new collection unique,
and indispensable for any collector of new
music.

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.

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.

On 180gm vinyl, a new LP mastering for Zlata Chochieva’s definitive modern recording of a landmark in the Romantic virtuoso repertoire.

In March 2013, Bryce Morrison in Gramophone welcomed Zlata Chochieva’s debut on Brilliant Classics, playing Rachmaninoff (PCL0047) noting that she is ‘the possessor of a comprehensive technique who brings an inner glow to every bar. Her phrasing is indelibly Russian in its fullness and warmth, backed by a dauntless and easy command.’
Her recordings have continued to attract such praise, with this recording of the Chopin Etudes winning an Editor’s Choice award in 2015. It was claimed that one renowned pianist regarded Chochieva’s interpretation as ‘the greatest I’ve ever heard’ – backed up by Jeremy Nicholas writing in Gramophone that ‘in each of the 27 studies Chochieva comes as close to anyone to how I hear the ideal performance in my head, or as I would wish to play them had I the ability to do so… Taken as read are a superlative technique and an ideal recorded sound… One of the most consistently inspired, masterfully executed and beautiful sounding versions I can recall.’

On LP, Chochieva’s version deserves to take its place alongside classic traversals such as Pollini on DG. As with all Piano Classics LPs, the vinyl version has been mastered at the Optimal factory, renowned for its audiophile standards. The LP is packaged as a gatefold with an extensive essay on the Etudes and a full biography for Chochieva, which concludes with this endorsement from Stephen Kovacevich: ‘Zlata Chochieva is one of the most interesting and unusual pianists today. She has superb technical abilities, but it is her personal intuition in the music she play s that is special. I would be interested to hear anything she does and that is rare.’

This new album presents a delightful selection of Poulenc’s piano music, starting with the intriguing little Valse (1919) from L’Album des Six, which first presented in published form the collective of Franco-Swiss composers who came to be known under that title. As the fruit of a trip to Italy in the company of Darius Milhaud, a fellow Les Six-er, Napoli is a suite written in 1925 and presenting Italian forms through the light of Poulenc’s irrepressible personality.
More affecting are the eight Nocturnes, composed between 1929 and 1938, and the three Novelettes (1927-1959), while the ’Six petites pièces enfantines’ that make up the Villageoises of 1933 share the a spirit of gentle playfulness with Poulenc’s popular musical tale, Babar the Elephant. One day when Poulenc was improvising on the piano, his cousin’s little girl exclaimed: “Grandfather, it’s so boring when you play like that, why don’t you play us this?”. And in 1945, once the dreadful war years were over, Poulenc was happy to oblige.
The Trois Mouvements perpetuels are early pieces, a product of the kaleidoscopic ‘harlequin years’ of Paris in the 1920s. The three movements reveal a musical freshness and fluidity somewhat reminiscent of Satie, whose individualistic approach to life and art inspired the members of Les Six, to whom he served as a kind of honorary president. Finally, Poulenc evokes the spirit of Bach returns in a surprising guise in the Valse-Improvisation sur le nom de Bach, a piece bursting with vitality, in perfect keeping with the famous pianist Vladimir Horowitz, to whom it was dedicated.
Two previous albums by Chiara Cipelli on Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics have won enthusiastic praise from reviewers in Fanfare magazine. The piano music of Bruno Bettinelli is ‘presented with wonderful vigour and colour by the fine young Lombardy native Chiara Cipelli’ (95801), while ‘Cipelli’s technical capabilities are impressive throughout’ her selection of early Messiaen pieces (PCL10200).

As the pre-eminent forerunners to Chopin’s works in the same genres, the Nocturnes of John Field have few rivals for music well known by history but so seldom heard. They were largely inspired by the slow movements of Classical concertos, Mozart above all, as well as opera arias. From them, Field evolved his own firm concept of a form with rich harmonies and gentle dynamics to suggest the night and dreaming, though in fact he began by giving these pieces traditional names such as Pastorale, Serenade and "Romance. He wrote the 18 works not as a set, but over the course of 15 years, rarely completing more than one and never more than three in a single year. Liszt observed in them ‘The total absence of everything that looks to effect'.

Even when he settled upon Nocturne, Field bestowed upon some of them a qualifying subtitle: ‘Cradle Song’ (No.6), ‘Reverie’ (No.7), ‘Song Without Words’ (No.13), ’Nocturne Pastorale’ (No.17), and ‘Nocturne characteristique Midi’ (No.18). This last Nocturne stands apart from its companions as a tribute to midday, cast as an Allegro, with a coda in which a chiming clock strikes twelve as quicker notes laugh and dance around the repeated note.

As a window on the salons of 19th century Europe, the Nocturnes are taxing neither to play nor to listen to, but they are polished with painstaking finesse, and they demand from the performer all the subtle pianistic guile of Chopin’s works: notably a command of rubato to shape the melodies, and the imaginative and technical capacities of a coloristic palette to bring variety without eccentricity to the sequence.

Tyler Hay can call upon such talents and skills as critics have recognized in his previous recordings for Piano Classics such as an album devoted to the music of John Ogdon (PCL10132) ‘Tyler Hay is a formidable pianist… I believe John Ogdon would be very pleased by these performances of his music’ (Fanfare). ‘The young pianist Tyler Hay has brilliantly mastered and assimilated these often elusive scores, even to the point where I heretically prefer his interpretations to Ogdon’s’ (Gramophone).

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.

A luxury-grade vinyl transfer in a gatefold 2LP set for a beautifully engineered 2021 album of Scarlatti on the piano from a master German pianist.
On its CD release in 2022, this personal choice from Scarlatti’s 555 keyboard sonatas won an enthusiastic welcome from Gramophone. ‘Contrasts of mood together with unified relationships of tempo and key signature characterise one the most intelligently programmed and distinctively played Scarlatti collections to cross my reviewer’s desk in years.’

Hardly less than Bach, these sonatas have become for many pianists a proving ground for their own technique and imagination, rewarding an improvisatory response to their flamboyant effects. Schmitt-Leonardy also features several of Scarlatti’s most poetic and reflective sonatas such as the ‘Aria’ Kk 29 and the melancholy soliloquy of Kk 208.
The approach taken by Schmitt-Leonardy is always ‘pianistic’, in that he exploits the full tonal resources of a modern concert grand. Yet his phrasing is also sensitive to 18th-century style and to the kind of effects and articulation particular to the harpsichord for which Scarlatti was writing. ‘Kaleidoscopic nuances and dynamic gradations abound throughout the E major Kk135,’ continued the Gramophone reviewer Jed Distler, the Gramophone reviewer Jed Distler, ‘but not garishly so. Nor does the pianist’s curvaceous and tapered phrasing throughout the A major Kk322 lapse into mannerism or cliché.’
As with all Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics LPs, this set is issued on 180-gram, high-grade vinyl pressed at the Optimal factory in Hamburg. Its audiophile quality is worthy of performances which bear comparison with great Scarlatti performers of past and present from Horowitz to Pletnev. Inner-sleeve booklet notes by Peter Quantrill discuss each of the sonatas in turn.

The most complete set of Lekeu’s piano music ever recorded, demonstrating the full range of genius cut off in his prime.

After his death from typhoid fever at the age of just 24, in January 1894, Debussy and many others lamented the passing of a musician with the world at his feet. ‘There is a Belgian school,’ wrote Debussy in 1896. ‘Next to Franck, Lekeu is one of its most remarkable representatives, this Lekeu, the only musician to my knowledge whom Beethoven really inspired.’

Partly due to his sudden demise, very little of his extant music has been published; among the works for piano only the monumental, five-movement Sonata in G minor, an album of three beautiful short pieces written in 1892, and a Mazurka. Jacopo Salvatori demonstrates, on this groundbreaking new album, how much else there is for pianophiles and enthusiasts for French romanticism to enjoy.

In his booklet note, Salvatori describes how he tracked down the manuscripts for several pieces heard here effectively for the first time. They include a beautiful four voices fugue written in 1889, a piece clearly influenced by the teaching of Franck. There is also a series called Morceaux egoists, of which some are lost, but there are pointers in what survives towards a different side of Lekeu to the one known from the familiar, Wagnerian richness of the Violin Sonata. Even the Piano Sonata takes on a different complexion as potentially more of a Suite, somewhat loosely assembled, but unified by a poetic motto from the writer George Vanor. Shedding such light on Lekeu makes Salvatori’s album a unique and valuable contribution to the appreciation of a still little-known but powerfully talented voice of the Belle Epoque.

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.

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 superb, collector’s-item vinyl transfer for a recent and widely acclaimed recording of Bach’s nocturnal meditations. When Piano Classics released this recording of the Goldberg Variations on CD in 2022, critics praised its natural phrasing and unobtrusively skilful and sensitive response to the technical demands made by Bach in his most virtuosic piece of keyboard writing.

According to Fanfare magazine, the playing of Klára Würtz ‘has limpid clarity, and rhythmic firmness and exactitude; her articulation is clean and nimble (she has a cleaner trill than Perahia), and her voicing of different lines is splendidly balanced. Her rapid playing is vigorous, her slower playing has calm repose. Her interpretive outlook has spirit and vivacity, but also a total sense of confidence and security, the kind of integrity that needs no ostentatious display to make its mark of absolute rightness... Perahia now has a pianistic rival on my shelf; strongly recommended.’ Reviewers elsewhere were hardly less enthusiastic. ‘Cards on the table, what Würtz’s Goldbergs offer is calm appreciation of the music’s manifold beauties,’ according to Rob Cowan in Gramophone. ‘Her pianism sidesteps overt display or affectedness in favour of purely musical values... This for me is truly great piano playing, a direct route to the soul with no tiresome diversions along the way.’ Vinyl collectors can now enjoy this superb recording in a new transfer made for analogue at the Edel factory in Hamburg, which specialises in collector’s print LP editions such as this one.

The heavy-grade vinyl has exemplary quiet surfaces, and the Dutch church acoustics of the original recording gain a rounded, luminous quality which ideally complements Klára Würtz’s pianism. The set is issued as a 2LP gatefold with booklet notes on the inner sleeve.

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.

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 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.