PIANO RECORDINGS

Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 3 & 4

For 19th-century audiences

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was the most loved of all his piano concertos, a work in which the balancing of high drama, tenderness, lyricism and humour is most pronounced and in which a coda resolves inner tensions with brilliance and triumphant grandeur. Piano Concerto No. 4 is the most introspective and poetic of the concertos. (Naxos)

1CD# 8574152

$13.99

Mozart: Piano Concertos, Nos. 17 & 27

Pianist Walter Klien studied with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Paul Hindemith and performed with the world’s top orchestras. The present recording has been realized in 1978 by the famous production team of Joanna Nickrenz and Marc Aubort from the appopriately named “Elite Recordings”. Many of their projects have achieved meanwhile collector status, especially those with American orchestras. (Vox Classics)

1CD# VOX-NX-3012CD $16.99

The Passionate Amy Beach / Solungga Liu

Solungga Liu has been acclaimed as a pianist of great breadth. She is a champion of early 20th-century American music and underrepresented works of the standard repertoire. She is also known as an uncanny interpreter of new music. Her November 2017 debut at the Library of Congress was praised for its “rhythmic precision, expression and a finely calibrated sense of balance between all of the moving parts.” (Centaur)

1CD# CRC3990

$15.99

Rachmaninoff: The Return, Piano Trio No. 2

Challenge Classics celebrates the Rachmaninov anniversary (150 years from his birth) with two noteworthy releases. The first one is a stunning debut recording by a young piano trio with strong, original and much thought-out ideas. Their account of Rachmaninov gigantic Second Piano Trio takes the listener back to the ‘period’ playing of the composer’s contemporaries. (Challenge)

1CD# CC 72920

$16.99

Haydn: Complete Piano Trios / Trio Gaspard

Described by Gramophone as ‘an album of joyous, imaginative music-making that whets the appetite for future installments’, the first volume of the Trio Gaspard’s Haydn cycle was enthusiastically received by buyers and critics alike. As with that first volume, the Trio have designed a program that works in its own right, and features trios from all periods of Haydn’s career. (Chandos)

Scriabin: 150th Anniversary – Piano Works / Sofronitski [12 CDs]

Having spent his childhood in Warsaw, where his family had settled when he was two years old, Vladimir Sofronitski came to be regarded as setting new standards for Chopin interpretation – an artistic focus that goes back to his first piano tuition in the Polish capital. In 1949, the centenary of Chopin’s death, Sofronitski performed all his piano works on five successive days at the great hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. (Profil)

12CD# PH22006

$34.99

Kapustin: Piano Concerto No. 5 / Nikokai Kapustin

When the music of Nikolai Kapustin was discovered by a wider audience in the West, it was positively shocking: Who was this Soviet composer, whose music sounded more like an Oscar Peterson improvisation than anything else – but who wrote detailed scores, black with notes?! As we discover more and more of his music, a very distinct, always wholly charming voice emerges. (Capriccio)

1CD# C5495

New Paths / Mari Kodama

$19.99

Mari Kodama presents New Paths, exploring the young Johannes Brahms and his fascinating friendship with Clara and Robert Schumann. The album derives its title from Robert Schumann’s famous essay “Neue Bahnen”, in which he heralded the young Brahms as the most eminent musical voice of the future. (Pentatone)

1SACD# PTC5186976 $19.99

Bartok, Brahms & Ginastera: 100 Years of the Piano Sonata / Michele Fazio

Michele Fazio’s first transcriptions for piano entitled ‘Baccanale’ from the Opera Samson and Dalila by Saint-Saëns and the ‘Notturno per Orchestra’ by J. Massenet from the ‘Suite Op. 13, No. 1’ are in progress, and he is releasing his first piano album entitled ‘100 years of Sonata form’, dedicated to three sonatas composed in exactly 100 years, The Second Sonata of Brahms, Bartok’s Sonata and Ginastera’s Sonata. (Centaur)

1CD# CRC3986 $15.99

Schubert: Piano Trios – Notturno [2 CDs]

1CD# CHAN 20270

$20.99

This new double-album by pianist Lars Vogt, violinist Christian Tetzlaff and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff includes some of Franz Schubert’s greatest works of chamber music, including his Piano Trios and the Arpeggione Sonata. This album stands as a testament of Lars Vogt’s outstanding chamber musicianship together with his long-time chamber music partners Christian Tetzlaff and Tanja Tetzlaff. (Ondine)

2CD# ODE 1394-2D $24.99