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.’

John Ogdon was one of the great musical geniuses of the 20th century. His astonishing career on the concert platform saw him become one of the world’s most popular pianists after winning joint 1st prize in the 1962 International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. Away from his life as a pianist, he was privately a very passionate composer throughout his career and despite his extremely heavy concert schedule, managed to write approximately two hundred works. Despite a small handful of works that were published during his lifetime, the rest of Ogdon’s manuscripts have remained almost entirely unexplored. Due to his pianistic ambitions, composition was always an unfocused pastime to John Ogdon and it is perhaps the reason why his writing style is sporadic and difficult to define.

It is arguable that his best work was produced in the late 1950s and '60s, before his infamous breakdown; they display a rather neo-romantic style, contrary to the avant-garde atonality written by most of his Manchester contemporaries. Despite enormous technical complexities, the piano writing is also wonderfully idiomatic and gives tremendous insight into the geographical facility of one of history’s most renowned piano techniques. This recording presents the four most important solo piano works from John Ogdon’s early years as a composer.

“I do enjoy composing, especially for the piano – I look on composing as a hobby that I enjoy. I devote myself more to playing and treat composition as a spare time thing.” (John Ogdon)

REVIEWS:

Not surprisingly, Ogdon’s piano-writing is thoroughly idiomatic and physically logical for the average hand.

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. For example, the Sonata benefits from Hay’s smoother and steadier control in the first-movement exposition and shapelier slow-movement trills. And while Ogdon’s exciting but slapdash live 1979 archival recording of the Variations and Fugue remains a valuable document, Hay’s studio traversal homes in on the daunting details without sacrificing the bigger picture. Furthermore, Hay’s booklet notes prove him to be every inch as intelligent and insightful away from the keyboard.

-- Gramophone (Jed Distler)

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).

‘Delucchi has done us a great service’, noted Fanfare magazine in January 2022 after the release of his Czerny album (PCL10204) on Piano Classics. This young Italian pianist continues to go from strength to strength and to broaden his already diverse catalogue of recordings for the label – spanning Bach, Godowsky and his own music – with this new album of Stravinsky’s works for the piano. The music of Stravinsky, like Beethoven, unmistakably bears the imprint of being composed at the piano – think of the pounding chords of The Rite of Spring or for that matter the delicate right-hand traceries in a later ballet such as Orpheus. However, the composer wrote relatively little dedicated to his own instrument. There are concertante works such as the Capriccio, composed as much as anything to give him something to play, to tour with and earn valuable income from in his appearances with orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic. The solo music is more niche, but no less characteristic, every note a Stravinsky note as Elliott Carter remarked. The Cinq doigts (Five Fingers) of 1921 were composed for a recording – probably the first-ever piece of music specifically written for that purpose – though the recording itself was lost until recently. Much of Stravinsky’s piano style is influenced by the records of ragtime which were brought back for him from New York around that time, including the rippling pianola textures and cross rhythms of the Sonata from three years later. Nearly all of these pieces belong to the Stravinsky of the 1920s – a figure of coruscating brilliance who could draw all music from the past to himself and make it his own. Counterpoint, hymn and a spirit of relaxed nonchalance all pervade the Serenade of 1925, while the brief Etudes encapsulate the glittering virtuoso tradition of Liszt and his successors within a few minutes. The rarity here is a transcription of the chorale from the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which Stravinsky expeditiously made for a magazine tribute to the memory of Debussy.

The two early concertos of Chopin are repertoire works, deservedly so, for their prodigious synthesis of virtuoso finesse and lyricism. However, the composer’s music for piano and orchestra does not stop there: he produced a quartet of standalone concertante pieces, each on the scale of his concerto first movements, which once were recorded as fill-ups to the concertos but have been neglected in recent years. The Russian pianist Ekaterina Litvintseva redresses this neglect with a beautifully polished new album of all four pieces, for which she receives warmly idiomatic support from the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Pardubice, on an intimate scale which the composer would have recognized (and preferred).

Chopin wrote his variations of Mozart’s ‘La ci darem’ as a prodigally talented teenager, a composition exercise for his teacher back in Warsaw. While cast in the popular style of its time – a grand introduction for a popular operatic melody, elaborated with pianistic sleights of hand for maximum effect, and a rousing finale – the piece is inspired with moments of originality that elevate it above contemporary comparison pieces. The Fantasy on Polish Airs and the Krakowiak soon followed, as Chopin was becoming celebrated across Europe as a new star of that new instrument, the piano. The themes in the Krakowiak are Chopin’s own,but their character is designedly Polish – mystic in the Romantic, piano-and-horn-led introduction, then sparkling with gaiety in the main Allegro. The same kind of formal balance is developed in the Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise Op. 22: it opens with the kind of ethereal melody which would soon become known as inimitably characteristic of Chopin, the dreamer of the piano, preeminent master of his art in the generation after Beethoven at translating a poetic consciousness and private thoughts into the domain of music.

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).

Born in 1878, Gabriel Èduard Xavier Dupont entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 15, studied with Massenet and Widor, and scored an early success with an opera performed at La Scala, before he died of tuberculosis at just 36. Dupont was already gravely affected by the condition as a teenager, and wrote this hour-long piano cycle between 1903 and 1905. Over the course of 14 movements, Les Heures Dolentes (‘The Sad Hours) depicts the observations of an invalid as he contemplates the world from his sick-bed. Beginning in relative calm, the cycle gradually increases in intensity, punctuated by periods of respite and consolation (‘Une amie’ arrives with flowers) and impressions of life outside (children playing in the garden), before the culmination of the climax in the penultimate piece (‘Nuit blanche – Hallucinations’), and a final return to calm, which leaves the listener a choice between hope and death. But for his early death, Dupont might have been one of the most renowned and admired voices in musical Impressionism.

A modern revival of interest is bringing to light his major works, which focus on music for the stage and for the piano: this release is the first in a series from Piano Classics documenting his complete piano output, which includes a second major cycle, La Maison dans les dunes. This too will be played by Giuseppe Taccogna, a pianist from the south of Italy who still lives and teaches there as a specialist in Romantic and late-Romantic repertoire such as Dupont and Rachmaninov. Taccogna’s own survey of Dupont’s life and work is printed in the booklet of this studio recording, which was made near the city of Bari late in 2022. Gabriel Dupont (1878-1914) died prematurely from tuberculosis, and perhaps one reason why he never attained the fame of his contemporaries like Ravel, Debussy and Faurè was his short life, signed by his illness and the large time spent in recovering in convalescent homes, alienated from the intellectual and artistic inspiration of the capital. On the other hand, this forced isolation allowed the composer to seek his own style and musical personality. Despite his unfortune life, in just over a decade he managed to realize some highly original works. In his two piano suites Gabriel Dupont left a formidable challenging witness of the musical atmosphere of the Belle Epoque: his music, hard to define, lies between romanticism and impressionism with strong connections to symbolism.

This new recording, volume 1 of the projected Complete Piano Works, presents the piano cycle Les heures dolentes, composed between 1903 and 1905 as he first fell ill from tuberculosis; it is a substantial piano cycle based on what was happening around him while he was in his recovery room. Beginning in relative calm, the cycle gradually increases in intensity, punctuated by periods of respite and consolation (A lady friend came with flowers), or life that continues outside (Children play in the garden) before the culmination of the climax in the second-last song (Nuit blanche - Hallucinations), and finally the return to calm, with the last piece that leaves the listener the choice between hope and death. The theme of "melancholy of happiness" (cit. Emmanuel Sauvlet) is the leitmotiv: the symbolistic contemplation of beauty and joy are pervaded by the melancholy awareness of man’s powerlessness in the face of his mortal destiny and ends in a calm, serene resignation.

Played by Italian pianist Giuseppe Taccogna. Specialized in performing Romantic and Late-Romantic repertoire, (such as Liszt, and Rachmaninoff) he is also an eclectic and versatile musician, a great singer and multi- instrumentalist with a vast repertoire that sweeps smoothly between different musical genres.

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".

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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

The two sonatas published by Medtner as his Opus 25 make a salutary contrast – the longest and most taxing of his sonatas placed alongside a sonatina-like work possibly intended for children. Apart from showing the range of the composer’s imagination and his capacity to build musical structures that show the most careful craftsmanship, these two sonatas reveal a view of the world that is very Medtnerian: a pairing of something childlike with the heroic and terrifying. ‘In Medtner you find the whole complexity of life,’ says Dina Parakhina. ‘He built his spiritual cathedrals out of chaos.’ Op.25 No.1 is known as the ‘Fairy Tale’ Sonata, and its four concise movements really do sound as if they deal with fairies, giants, witches and goblins. The Six Fairy Tales Op.51 further illuminate this side of Medtner’s musical personality. Dina Parakhina hears a Russian figure of the Fool in No.2, and Cinderella in the balletic turns of No.3, ‘the most lyrical, elegant and feminine in style’ and perhaps a portrait of his wife. Medtner prefaced the mighty Op.25 No.2 Sonata with a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev: ‘Night wind, night wind, why do you howl?’ Longer than half an hour, this single movement invites comparison with the B minor Sonata of Liszt and the final sonata of Beethoven as a summit of late-Romantic piano literature, which absorbs tempests and idylls within his personal synthesis of German, contrapuntal rigour and Russian lyricism. The Russian-born pianist Dina Parakhina has Medtner’s music in her blood and under her fingers, as a student at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire at the top of a class which included Mikhail Pletnev. She became a professor of piano there before moving to the UK, where she teaches at the Royal College of Music and Royal Northern College, as well as performing around the country. Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) was born in Moscow. After piano lessons with his mother he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he had lessons from Pavel Pabst and Sergey Taneyev. He won the prestigious Anton Rubinstein Prize at age 20. A younger contemporary of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff he was destined for a brilliant pianistic career but he chose to concentrate on composition. In 1936 he settled in London where he spent the rest of his life teaching and composing till 1951. Medtner’s style is rooted in the 19th century, full-blooded romantic, with a highly personal harmonic and melodic language, often complex and dense, but hauntingly beautiful. This new recording presents the two Piano Sonatas Op. 25, the first a Fairy Tale Sonata, the second a colossal, enigmatic, fantastic, nocturnal work, which is considered by many to be not only Medtner's best work, but one of the best sonatas of the entire 20th Century. It was completed in 1911 and dedicated to Sergei Rachmaninoff, who immediately recognized its greatness. Under the title "Sonata" Medtner added a note: "The whole piece is in an epic spirit". Dina Parakhina is a Russian-born pianist and teacher. Piano Professor at the Royal College of Music since 2009, and College Fellow since 2019, Dina taught piano at the Central Music School in Moscow for sixteen years. She performs as a soloist with orchestras, makes recordings for CDs and radio, gives master-classes across the world, and sits on the juries of international piano competitions. Born in Sochi, Dina moved to Moscow without her family to study piano aged twelve. At the Central Music School, she studied under Professor Tamara Aleksandrovna Bobovich; at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Dina studied with Evgeny Malinin, a protégé of Heinrich Neuhaus.

Variations and salon miniatures by the father of the classical tradition in Russia – Mikhail Glinka's piano works lie in the shadow of his operas, romances and orchestral music but they share the distinctive voice, the brilliance and Franco-Russian accent of foundational pieces in the Russian classical tradition such as Ruslan and Ludmila. The works recorded here date from the 1820s to the 1840s, when there was no regular concert life or musical education in Russia and when the salon and the opera still formed the centres of musical life. Glinka models his keyboard writing accordingly on the forms immortalised by Chopin such as the waltz, nocturne and mazurka, and the variations on songs, popular Italian opera melodies.

Viacheslav Shelepov opens this beautifully curated album with a delicious set of variations on Alyabyev’s song The Nightingale, cast in a nostalgic E minor. The tiny, three-minute variations on Amid the Plain Valley (a Russian song) are entirely within the salon format, and the Variations on a Scottish Song have a Mendelssohnian delicacy of texture, but the closing variations on a theme from Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi are evidently conceived with the concert stage in mind, and with the fingers of a virtuoso to embrace their exuberant writing. Viacheslav Shelepov intersperses these variations with one-off demonstrations of Glinka’s mastery in whatever form he chose to address himself. The G major Barcarolle from 1847 deserves to take its place alongside much more familiar examples by Chopin and Mendelssohn for its memorable distillation of poetry and the tug of the gondolier’s oars in its rhythm. A D major Fugue works up a relatively sober theme to a satisfying climax out of proportion to its three-minute duration. Also from 1847, the Prayer is much more dramatic and eventful than its title would suggest, especially in this dynamically shaded account by Viacheslav Shelepov. Born in 1991, Shelepov studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire and the Hochschule für Musik in Hannover, while winning prizes at several renowned piano competitions across Europe. He brings to these performances a keen awareness of period practice in the lightness of his touch, while also playing with the rhythmic freedom which Romantic composers such as Glinka, Chopin and Schumann wove into the fabric of their piano music. An attractive program of rarely recorded piano music by Michael Glinka (1804-1857), the “Father of Russian music”. In the first half of the 19th century Glinka gave a distinctive national character and flavour to Russian music, mainly in his vocal and operatic works. These piano works however smell of chic 19th century salons, written in brilliant “divertimento”-style, aimed at pleasing and amazing the audience, melodious, charming and showing off the virtuoso skills of the performer. The piano music consists of sets of Theme & Variations, a Mazurka, Waltz, Barcarole and Nocturne. Viacheslav Shelepov plays Glinka on an 1846 Érard piano, enticing the listener to share his admiration for this music with a blend of historical style and personal enthusiasm. Viacheslav was born in 1991 in Barnaul, Russia. He graduated from the Academic Music College (Moscow) and Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Faculty of historical and modern performing arts. He studied fortepiano with Alexei Lubimov and Alexei Shevchenko, harpsichord with Maria Uspenskaya, modern piano with Sergey Kasprov. He is the winner of several international pianoforte competitions.

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.

A new recording of all the major works for piano by a foundational figure in French music of the early 20th century. Born in 1865, Dukas could have (and probably did) compose a good deal literally and stylistically in the 19th century, but his fastidious craftsmanship and self-criticism saw him burn far more music than he allowed to survive. All of a sudden, on the turn of the new century, he wrote two large-scale works which bring together a reverence for the recent and long-gone past with bold new thinking of how to write for the piano. Begun in 1899, the Variations take an innocent dance theme by Rameau and subject it to a dazzling sequence of treatments coloured by strict counterpoint, dreamy rhapsody and a Lisztian scale of piano writing. Even more ambitious and contrapuntal in its workings is the 40-minute Piano Sonata which has long been regarded as a summit of fin-de-siècle piano writing. The Sonata has often been compared to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata for its colossal dimensions, its structural complexities and its tightrope virtuoso writing. Dukas himself later discussed its journey in terms of a symbolic victory over ‘the beast within’, and ‘the triumph of Apollo over the Pythian serpent’. Vincenzo Maltempo follows in the footsteps of virtuosos such as Michel Ponti and Marc-André Hamelin, and shows himself equipped for the task, having already accumulated a critically acclaimed catalogue of hyper-virtuoso repertoire on Piano Classics, including five albums of Alkan, the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt and the complete Sonatas of Scriabin. He possesses the virtuosity to burn which this music demands, but also the poetic sensibility to bring the most subtle nuances of colour to bear on two miniatures from much later in Dukas’s career, a Prélude in memory of Haydn and a deeply felt tribute to the memory of Debussy which makes haunting reference to the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.

First released in 2015, unavailable now for some time, this complete survey of Reynaldo Hahn’s piano music features several first recordings as well as a feast of charming and unfamiliar music from the golden age of the French salon. Though he is probably now best known for a stream of winning and witty songs, the shimmering diversity of Hahn’s output for solo piano bears the mark of quintessentially French qualities, as though the Venezuelan composer was seeking to demonstrate that Paris was his true home. Many pieces here derive their refined charm not only from their elegance, their lightness of touch and sensuous harmony – all ‘French’ qualities by association – but Hahn is still capable of springing surprises throughout the novel forms and piquant harmonies of his most substantial collection, Le rossignol éperdu.

Themes running through this music are deft portraits of people, landscapes and seas: a quartet of painters inspired by the poetry of Proust (1894); from two years earlier, an 11-minute suite dedicated to moonlight (Au clair de lune); a sextet of delicious Asian and near-Eastern evocations such as a nocturne over the Bosphorus. Hahn readily adopts a neoclassical costume when it suits him, in eight tone-paintings of Versailles and the Thème varié sur le nom de Haydn which he was invited to write in 1910 as a centenary tribute alongside Debussy and the other French greats of their day. Alessandro Deljavan began studying the piano when he was not quite two years old. By the age of 16, he had already graduated from his degree in piano from the Verdi Conservatory in Milan. He has performing worldwide, and been placed highly in many competitions such as the Van Cliburn in Texas.

‘She is adventurous, as well as accomplished’ (Fanfare) – Ilia Kim’s second volume of Clementi for Piano Classics juxtaposes a quartet of musical ‘trifles’ with a trio of adventurous mid-period sonatas. In Ilia Kim’s new recital, Clementi comes across in all his remarkable individuality. She opens with the F sharp minor Sonata Op. 25 No. 5: a work stirred by strong passions, far from the polite, elegant and superficial manner with which Clementi is sometimes associated, reaching a powerful climax in its Lento e patetico slow movement. By contrast, the D major Sonata Op. 25 No. 6 is a work of Haydnesque high spirits and uncomplicated good humor, in which the chromatic harmony lending such pathos to Op. 25 No. 5 takes on an air of mischief. The Sonata Op. 37 No. 2 was published in 1798, and belongs to the period of his maturity. The first movement is symphonic in scale and reminiscent of Haydn. The second is clearly inspired by Handel, while the lively finale is a like a dazzling finale to a comic opera. The sonata embodies and reconciles different styles, even within the first movement, where the first theme in the symphonic style alternates with the counterpoint of the second theme and the brilliant piano style of the connections and developments.

Korean born, Italian resident Ilia Kim performs across Europe and Asia, specializing in thematically linked programs of Romantic repertoire. Her experience as a fortepianist also informs her playing of Classical-era repertoire on the piano such as these Clementi recordings for Piano Classics.

As stringent a critic of his fellow composers as he was of himself, Mendelssohn wrote in unusually effusive terms about the Etudes Op. 70 when Moscheles sent them to him in 1829. ‘Your splendid Etudes are the best pieces of music that I have heard for a long time, as instructive and useful for the musician as they are gratifying for the listener. Might you be prepared to publish a third volume? You would be rendering a service to all music lovers.’ The Op. 70 Etudes have attracted previous recordings, complete and in part, but they are presented here for the first time on instruments of the composer’s time – an 1844 Erard and a modern copy of an 1819 Graf model – thus releasing and intensifying the color and playfulness of works which transcend their didactic origins. Some of technical and tonal innovations in these studies represented a creative stimulus for composers including Schumann, Liszt and Chopin. Schumann dedicated his ambitious Sonata Op. 14 to Moscheles, and believed that the Op. 70 Etudes made his friend one of the greatest composers of piano music of the age. Surely the greatest piano teacher of his age – perhaps the greatest ever – Chopin religiously used the Op. 70 Etudes for instruction as a kind of New Testament to set alongside Bach and Beethoven. Moreover, they clearly made a considerable impact on his own Etudes, Op. 10 and Op. 25. No. 23 of Moscheles’s set is the only explicitly programmatic one, cast as ‘a battle among demons’, but there is no shortage of immediate drama and theatre throughout the set, especially in the hands of Michele Bolla.