Mozart's progress from child prodigy to mature brilliance, from innocent insight to inspired innovation, is measured out in his piano music. Somm's survey of six works for one, two and three pianos brilliantly charts both his phenomenal development and his far-reaching transformation of the concerto form. Two of today's finest, most accomplished and admired pianists - Valerie Tryon and Peter Donohoe - bring unrivalled experience to bear in impeccable, incisive and illuminating accounts of the solo and duo works. The young, fast-rising Mishka Rushdie Momen joins them for the discretely dazzling Piano Concerto No.7 for three pianos. Three other concertos are featured. Composed for Mozart's sister, Nannerl, the two-piano No.10 is a playful but challenging exercise in sibling rivalry. A favorite of Beethoven's, No.20 is marked by a dark-hued drama and broiling emotional turbulence banished by it's surprise sunny ending. Famously, it prompted Haydn to tell Mozart's father, "Your son is the greatest composer whom I know in person or by reputation". The Piano Concerto No.21 is distinguished by it's melodic directness, guileless wit and the balletic interaction between piano and orchestra, it's meltingly lyrical Andante popularised by it's use in the 1967 film Elvira Madigan and American pop star Neil Diamond's 1972 chart hit, Song Sung Blue. Echoing the galant style of the Seventh Piano Concerto, the ebullient, lyrical and bright Sonata for Two Pianos in D pulls and pushes the focus between the two instruments in music of delightfully genial resourcefulness. Composed a year later, the Fantasia in C minor for solo piano boasts a cornucopia of mesmerising effects as it spins the piano line into altogether idiomatic flights of dark-toned fantasy richly realised by Valerie Tryon.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

SOMM RECORDINGS is pleased to announce a sparkling recital of Virtuoso Piano Transcriptions spanning two centuries from Bach to Gershwin by pianist Alessandro Taverna. During it's peak popularity in the century from 1820, the art of transcription provided access in both the home and the concert hall to the riches of the symphonic and operatic repertoires through the conduit of the piano. Recorded as part of the 2018/2019 Piano Series at Turner Sims, Southampton, Alessandro Taverna celebrates a lost art that made great music available to the widest audience in an era before the first recordings and radio. Treated to a masterly re-imagining by Rachmaninoff, Bach's Third Violin Partita opens a recital that also showcases Taverna elegant virtuosity at the keyboard. A characteristically combustible re-working of themes from Mozart's Don Giovanni, Liszt's R�miniscences de Don Juan takes full advantage of the piano's full orchestral range and sounds all the more remarkable in Taverna's by turns poetic and powerful performance. Liszt's transcriptions of three Schubert songs reveal his sensitivity to the originals and his appreciation of the piano's ability to conjure fantasy to mesmeric effect, his 'paraphrase' of Verdi's Rigoletto a miniature marvel for the piano. Echoes of Liszt can be heard in Ernst von Dohn�nyi's delightfully dancing re-working of Johann Strauss the Younger's Schatz Walzer and in George Gershwin's electric, effervescent arrangement of his own Rhapsody in Blue, a thrilling display of pianistic fireworks brilliantly realized by Taverna. Alessandro Taverna's previous recordings for SOMM include Sonatas by Nicolai Medtner and music by Debussy and Ravel, of which Fanfare magazine said: "Boldness and refinement keeps the playing interesting at every moment... Taverna distinguishes every textural strand with clarity... this superb release will add lustre to his reputation"."

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce Leon McCawley's Second Volume of Piano Sonatas by Franz Joseph Haydn. McCawley's admired first volume, pairing Haydn's Sonatas and Variations, received a coveted Diapason d'Or for playing of "great intelligibility and sensitivity". Sonata No.60 from Volume I has been selected by Diapason to appear on it's next album, Les indispensables de Diapason, featuring six Haydn sonatas played on different keyboards. In his authoritative booklet notes, Bryce Morrison makes a persuasive argument for the Piano Sonatas in "celebrating Haydn's endless innovation, richness and variety and, most importantly, his humanity". Those qualities are brilliantly realised by McCawley in six sonatas spanning 25 years. Caught on the cusp of youth and maturity, Sonata No.19 is a work of lyrical and dramatic contrasts with a unique structure and surprising innovation. At odds with the inherited image of Haydn as a prankster, Sonata No.47 inhabits a dark, even menacing world that concludes in abrupt savagery. The Bach-accented Sonata No.50 is a work characterised by scintillating writing, Sonata No.54, in Morrison's memorable phrase, "falls like balm on the ear". Ushering in new approaches and radical thinking, two late Sonatas - Nos. 58 and 59 - show Haydn anticipating Beethoven with prescient command of tone and combustible technique. Leon McCawley's previous recordings for SOMM have received wide critical praise. Gramophone hailed his complete Rachmaninov Preludes as "a distinguished issue", and the "superb collection" of Samuel Barber's piano music was an Editor's Choice. Fanfare described his playing of Brahms as "music-making of a very high order" with International Record Review adding: "When all is said and done, it is difficult to know whether McCawley's refined piano playing, his natural yet cultivated musicality or his boundless imagination warrants the greater praise. You must hear the recording."

This is the concluding disc in a four-CD collection of Beethoven's complete music for piano trio, recorded live by the Gould Piano Trio in a series of concerts at St. George's, Brandon Hill in Bristol, UK. We end the series with a unique coupling that marries the very first work Beethoven wrote for piano trio - the little Trio in E flat composed when he was 22 - with his last work, the supreme masterpiece known as "Archduke" written 20 years later. This CD marks the culmination of one of the most important chamber music recording projects by a British ensemble in recent years.

As a tribute to Alexander Baillie on his 60th birthday, he and John Thwaites join together to create an outstanding release of cello and piano music by Brahms. The Brhams Sonatas have formed part of many a recital by Baillie and Thwaites over the years but what makes these so special are the pianos. The pianos for this release were chosen specifically for each sonata and are authentic to the time of the composition.

This release is a unique opportunity for the listener who has interest in historical performance. This four-disc set contains virtually the entire 1928 Elgar studio sessions of the Cello Concerto, as well as several unused takes of major orchestral works and miniatures- pressings which have hitherto been unheard. These pressings are from Elgar’s own private library by way of Arthur Reynolds, a keen collector of original Elgar photographs and recordings. The only person to whom Arthur Reynolds granted access to this treasure trove was master recording engineer, Lani Spahr. In his work, Lani Spahr was able to synchronize the various sides into a stereo image through hours of painstaking effort. This provides insight into the sessions themselves, along with astonishing sound quality.

The third volume of Peter Donohoe's acclaimed survey of Mozart's Piano Sonatas for SOMM Recordings focuses on three works from the second half of the 1780s - including his last exercise in the form, Sonata No.18 (K576) - together with two exquisite miniatures. Although likely composed as teaching materials, the sibling Sonatas Nos.10 (K330) and 11 (K331) eloquently push their intended student- players with considerable technical challenges that point to Mozart's own development as a composer. The C major Sonata No.10 opens in an unabashedly didactic frame of mind before blossoming into a rich and satisfying work, by turns playfully intimate, operatic and always testing the abilities of soloist and piano. As Christopher Morley notes in his informative booklet notes, the Sonata No.11 in A major, with it's tradition-defying structure, seems "more like a suite than a conventional sonata". Opening with variations on Rechte Lebensart ('The right way of living'), a song from southern Germany where Mozart's father Leopold had his roots, it ends with the effervescent, ever- popular 'Rondo Alla Turca'. Interspersing the sonatas, the K574 Gigue pays homage to Bach and echoes the finale to Mozart's own Symphony No.40 while the K540 Adagio is, says Morley, "one of the most inwardly personal of Mozart's compositions". This new release follows critical acclaim for Volume 1 (SOMMCD 0191) including the accolades of MusicWeb International's Recording of the Year and BBC Music Magazine's Recording of the Month which declared: "It was high time someone blew the cobwebs off this still under-appreciated repertoire, and Donohoe is clearly the person to do it". Musical Opinion described Donohoe in Volume 2 (SOMMCD 0198) as "an ideal interpreter", adding "no finer accounts of these still neglected masterpieces will have been offered to the public".

SOMM Recordings explores one of the most significant partnerships in 20th-century British music with Fa�ades, an album of piano-accompanied songs and music for four-hand piano by William Walton and Constant Lambert. Fa�ades takes it's title from Walton's era-defining "entertainment", heard here in arrangements for four-hand piano of it's two orchestral Suites by Lambert - regarded by Walton as the definitive reciter of Edith Sitwell's nonsense verses. Lambert's Trois pi�ces n�gres pour les touches blanches for piano duet are a kaleidoscopic, jazz-accented tour de force exploration of the piano's white keys. Described by the composer as an "idyll", Walton's Siesta (also for two-player piano) is, says Ronald Woodley in his entertaining and informative booklet notes, "infused with the clear light and open charm of Italy". The eight song settings by Lambert of poems by the eighth-century Chinese poet LI Po are "exquisitely crafted, restrained and often enigmatic miniatures [marked by an] elusive and allusive musical style". Completing the recital, a selection of songs by Walton range from Tudor pastiche (Under the Greenwood Tree) to the atonal-inflected Tritons and lyrically captivating Beatriz's Song. Making their SOMM debuts are tenor James Geer and his accompanist in the songs, pianist Ronald Woodley. The latter is joined at the keyboard in the four-hand piano arrangements by Andrew West whose previous SOMM recordings include three acclaimed volumes of Parry's English Lyrics.

Volume II of SOMM Recordings' Beethoven Plus series sees violinist Krysia Osostowicz and pianist Daniel Tong reuniting to conclude their ambitious project to commission 10 leading contemporary composers to write 'companion' pieces for - and inspired by - Beethoven's seminal set of 10 Violin Sonatas. The result is a fascinating conversation between past and present in which Beethoven's mastery of the form prompts illuminating - and often surprising - commentary from entirely modern perspectives. Volume II includes Beethoven's three most substantial Sonatas - Opp.30 No.2, 47 and 96 - and the enigmatic A major (Op.30 No.1); works that go to the very heart of the composer's life, aspirations and music. New here are complementary and contrasting works that include Kurt Schwertsik's probing, sincerely touching two-movement Unterwegs Nach Heiligenstadt, which begins in angst and ends in sublime C major; Matthew Taylor's whirlwind Tarantella Furiosa, a virtuosic encore of sorts to Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata; and Philip Ashworth's Air, a lilting, lyrical commentary that seems to offer a response, in it's conclusion, to Beethoven's famously rhetorical query "Must it be so?" David Matthews' Sonatina completes the new commissions in a compact, concentrated form that emulates Beethoven with almost forensic attention to detail, even while opening out his interrogation of the Op.96 Sonata (Beethoven's last such work for violin and piano) with challenging demands on both violin and piano. Beethoven Plus was presented in a series of concerts by Krysia Osostowicz and Daniel Tong (who provides informative booklet notes) at the Kings Place, London in 2015 and has since been performed in leading venues around the UK. Reviewing Volume I, Gramophone hailed "Osostowicz and Tong's interpretative style [as] patient, affectionate, warmly conversational, sensitive to harmonic detail", it's reviewer adding: "I think I may have sighed with pleasure".