Liszt: La leggierezza - Étude de concert No. 2, S144

This CD showcases Backhaus’s great virtuosity.

The second album of Vanessa Benelli Mosell, one of the most exciting pianists of the younger generation, contains a selection of works which Liszt regularly performed himself during his piano recitals (the piano recital itself, being a showcase for one artist only, was invented by Liszt). The works share a quality to impress the audience, whether through hair-raising pyrotechnics (Hungarian Rhapsodies, Grand Galop Chromatique), or heartfelt sentiment (Liebestraum). Vanessa’s first album (Brilliant Classics 94209) was met with great enthusiasm from the international press.The Gramophone wrote: “Prodigious playing that combines the blazing virtuosic demand and her natural musical insight…great panache… sparkling technique in demanding music…she leaves no doubt of her enviable facility”. New

recording, newly written liner notes. A second disc from the brilliant young Italian pianist brings a focus on the 19th century lion of piano music whose anniversary was celebrated last year.

The first Brilliant Classics disc from Vanessa Benelli Mosell included music by Prokofiev and Scriabin: a test for even the most engulfing virtuoso. "Sparkling technique in demanding music", "She leaves no doubt of her enviable facility through out this, her ultra-demanding debut album", "Dextrous and cool-headed, she launches into Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata at a cracking pace...she is off like a rocket in the drum-beat 7/8 Precipitato finale, remarkably maintaining her impetus in the ever-widening leaps of the closing pages." Gramophone, November 2011 This new Liszt disc is structured after the fashion of a recital such as the composer himself might have given; with shorter and lighter items sprinkled among unabashed showpieces, and in the centre, an exploration of the composer’s complex relationship with his homeland expressed through native melodies and dances transmuted into new forms through the fantasymedium of the Hungarian Rhaposody. To finish, the fireworks of the Grand galop chromatique, beloved of Cziffra, Bolet and others in whose pianistic footsteps Vanessa Benelli Mosell dances with abandon.

This CD brings over twenty-five minutes of Sofronitsky's teaching of three of Scriabin’s pieces as well as performances of four Scriabin pieces, all recorded privately at his Moscow apartment in 1954. The lessons are meticulously indexed with carefully labelled translations in the booklet. There's also a selection of private and live recordings from 1947 and 1954 of works by Scriabin, Schumann, Liszt, Debussy and Mendelssohn.

WARNING: Although sonically challenged, these recordings have been available due to their profound historical significance. Also, the relatively extreme length [79.57] of this CD may cause reading problems in some early model players.

The outstanding Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich recorded these concertos in Switzerland in 1959, when she was only 18 years old. This CD also includes a 1957 perfomance of Liszt’s Etude de concert No.2 “La leggierezza”

Earl Wild’s death in 2010 was a farewell to one of the greatest pianists from the Golden Age of the Piano. His career spanned the biggest part of the 20th Century (more than 80 years), and he played with such legendary conductors as Toscanini, Reiner, Horenstein, Mitropoulos, Klemperer, Ormandy, Dorati and Solti. A dazzling virtuoso, he made the music of Liszt a central point in his repertoire. His performances of Gnomenreigen, La Leggierezza or the Mephisto Waltz were legendary. This 2-CD set offers some of the finest Liszt playing on disc. CD 1 was issued on Vanguard Classics as “The Demonic Liszt” and shows the devilish side of Liszt, the multifaceted genius. The second CD contains live recordings from different periods, red-hot performances of great brilliance and passion.

One of the greatest musical artists of modern Turkey, Gülsin Onay is an exceptional phenomenon, and Sono Luminus is excited to release her latest project, Liszt, Haydn, Schubert. Listeners will marvel at the kaleidoscopic range of colours she can produce from the instrument, with her unique touch in which even the least important, fleeting note has its own special meaning.

Gülsin Onay excels both in recital and in concerto, playing alongside many leading orchestras - among them the Philharmonia, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic, Wiener Symphoniker, the Radio Symphony Orchestras of Copenhagen and Helsinki, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Japan Philharmonic, Sinfonia Varsovia, and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic - and conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenzy, Erich Bergel, Michael Boder, Andrey Boreyko, Jörg Faerber, Edward Gardner, Emmanuel Krivine, Ingo Metzmacher, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jose Serebrier, Vassily Sinaisky and Stanislaw Wislocki.

Gülsin Onay also appears as a guest at major festivals around the world, including Berlin, Warsaw, Granada, Mozartfest Würzburg, Newport, Miami, Schleswig-Holstein and Istanbul.

A natural soloist, Gülsin Onay is equally at home with music of all periods and styles: her repertoire ranges from Bach and Scarlatti to the contemporary, taking in the great classical and romantic works of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has championed the music of the contemporary Turkish composer A. Adnan Saygun, whose 2nd Piano Concerto was dedicated to her. Other contemporary composers who have dedicated works to Gülsin Onay are Hubert Stuppner, Denis Dufour, Jean-Louis Petit, Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz and Marc-André Hamelin. Her recordings illustrate the breadth of her repertoire: concertos by Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and Stuppner, and both concertos by Saygun; solo music by Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Debussy, Franck, Medtner, Ravel, Bartók, Busoni and Saygun; and two live concert DVDs, featuring a critically-acclaimed recital at the Miami festival, and concertos by Grieg and Saint-Saëns. Forthcoming releases include the concertos by Khachaturian and Ulvi Cemal Erkin, with Jose Serebrier and the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra.

Though Hungarian by birth, and having studied at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Louis Kentner, like so many others of Jewish origin, immigrated to London in the mid 1930s, aware that central Europe was not the best place to be at that time for someone of his race. He was to remain in London for the rest of his life, becoming very much part of British musical life both as pianist and, later, as teacher. His somewhat sensational London debut took place in the Aeolian Hall in October 1936 where he gave an all Liszt recital. As a direct result he was signed up by HMV and over the next fifteen years, in addition to much other repertoire, he made a large number of Liszt recordings which featured not only the often recorded etudes and Hungarian Rhapsodies but also premiere recordings of many of Liszt's more important, but then less well known, larger works. Our first APR title (APR5514) featured such unusual works as the Scherzo & March, the Berceuse and the first Polonaise; on the current disc, in addition to a number of the well known aforementioned etudes, we find a group of late pieces, including the bizarre Czárdás Macabre, which was only published in the year of its recording, and the Meyerbeer/Liszt 'Les Patineurs' scherzo. This later piece is one of Liszt's most brilliant operatic transcriptions, but is strangely little known. It is perhaps Kentner's most stunning recording and a fitting way to end this fascinating recital.

Alfred Cortot was one of the very greatest pianists of the 20th Century, renowned above all for his intuitive, highly personal interpretations of Romantic masterpieces.

Drawn from sessions in London between 1931 and 1948, these recordings include a wonderfully poetic reading of Weber’s introspective and playful Second Piano Sonata, and intense yet subtly nuanced renditions of Liszt’s groundbreaking B minor Sonata, issued almost entirely from first takes, and Légende No. 2.

Cortot’s own arrangements imbue Schubert’s Litanei and Brahms’s famous Lullaby with a heartfelt touch.

A critic wrote after Cortot’s 5th January 1927 recital at New York’s Aeolian Hall: “He is one of those great musicians from whose readings of familiar works there is almost invariably something to learn and remember… it would be hard to surpass his sincerity, his feeling, his colouring, and declamation of the music. Nor are many as fortunate as he in striking the mean between what is nobly expressive and what is sentimental….”