Chopin: Étude Op. 10 No. 5 in G flat major 'Black Key' - CD

The story of Dino Ciani unfolded in the brief span of a few years.

A period rich in events, successes and hopes that everybody, friends and admirers alike, felt were soon to be realised. Memorable were the technical ease, the smoothness and elegance of Ciani’s playing. Dino Ciani left us on 27th March 1974, meeting his sad destiny on the Via Flaminia near Rome: a road accident, one of the many tragedies to which journalistic routine generally reserves just a few lines at the bottom of the page. News of Dino’s death struck a chill blow to the heart of the entire world of music, not just in Italy, at the time. Twenty-eight years have passed since that tragic accident and Dynamic has decided to dedicate Ciani this 6-CD box set at half price, containing live and studio recordings which have not been digitally re-mastered in order to offer an authentic document of this pianist’s talent.

Piano Classics is the ideal introduction to the world of the keyboard. Over nine hours of critically acclaimed performances of keyboard masterworks by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Liszt. Artists featured include Bernard Roberts, Shura Cherkassky, Vlado Perlemuter and Martin Jones. Extensive booklet notes will open a world of discovery.

Over three-and-a-half decades Maurizio Pollini has traversed the major works of Chopin as no other pianist of his time. Here is the legacy of this unique achievement, in a single box set for the first time. Including the complete Chopin recordings, from 1972 to 2008; the Études, Preludes, Polonaises, Sonatas, Scherzi, Ballades, and Nocturnes.

10CD boxed set collects all of Berezovsky’s recordings for both Teldec and Warner Classics.

Boris Berezovsky has established a great reputation, both as the most powerful of virtuoso pianists and as a musician gifted with a unique insight and a great sensitivity. He is regularly invited by the most prominent orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome), Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de France and Philharmonia Orchestra (London). He will make his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in January 2012 With Teldec, Boris Berezovksy has recorded works of Chopin, Schumann, Rachmaninov, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, Medtner, Ravel and the complete Liszt Transcendental Studies. His recording of the Rachmaninov sonatas was awarded the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik and his Ravel disc was recommended by Le Monde de la Musique, Diapason, BBC Music Magazine and Independent on Sunday. Boris Berezovsky also won the BBC Music Magazine Awards in 2006.

In October 2004, still with Warner Classics International, the Berezovsky Trio recorded the Shostakovich Trio n°2 and Rachmaninov Trio Elégiaque n°2, which were awarded the Choc de la Musique in France, the Gramophone Award in the UK and the Echo Classic 2005 in Germany. His Solo live recording of the Chopin/Godowsky Etudes, released in January 2006, received the Diapason d'Or and the RTL d'Or.

Samson’s early recordings, dating from the end of the 1940s, were mainly devoted to Frédéric Chopin, who already occupied a prominent position in his concert programmes.

The height of Samson’s art is probably to be found in the ballades (recorded between 26 and 28 October 1954, and first issued as an immensely successful 10" LP) and the dazzling interpretation of the nocturnes (recorded in May and June 1966).

In the ballades and the nocturnes Samson establishes an all-embracing colour with the aid of the loud pedal, although he modulates its power and creates a rainbow effect through the highly skilled, yet quite unpredictable use of the soft pedal. This alternation between the two pedals gives a breathless feeling to his approach. You will never find there the peaceful, semi-philosophical havens, nor the “landscaped” perspectives of neo-Classical pastoralism favoured by so many of his fellow artists, notably in the Fourth Ballade.

Samson strikes a balance between the visual and the narrative. The harmonic suspensions, which form the nub of the ballades, seem as if they are absorbed by this visionary ability, and all that preceded and all that followed could only be narration. Rarely have other pianists taken a similar view, and only Claudio Arrau – in his legendary first recording of the ballades made in 1953 – evolved within this perspective.

The nocturnes, recorded twelve years later, in 1966, possess the same burnished colour that characterises a Rembrandt background, despite the more analytical clarity cast by stereo sound. Once again it is Arrau, who, by voluntarily darkening his range of colours, seems to come nearest to this sultry vision of the nocturnes, while another leading interpreter of the cycle, the Polish pianist Stefan Askenase, was to fix his gaze obstinately in the direction of moonlight and the bel canto aesthetic.

If we are to go by the history of gramophone recording, no other pianist before him had discovered the personal, inimitable accent which Samson gives to the melodic pattern of these works, and which was not to be taken up by any other: over-intimate, perhaps, or over-rhapsodic, it is stylistically close to improvisation. If Samson still seems to be following a given declamatory scheme in the ballades, then the range of styles and expressiveness which he deploys for the abundant inventiveness of the nocturnes, has nothing to do with the innermost nature of the interpreter. For a good decade, Samson did not go back on his beliefs: he reinforced them.

Samson’s life was abruptly cut short in 1970 at a ridiculously early age – he was 46. Neither as pupil nor as teacher did he have any interest in pedagogy. Was this because he chose to keep his distance from all relationship or dependency? There is something of the stateless person in Samson’s pianistic style.

Furthermore, it seems very difficult to compare his art with that of other pianists. However, those French pianists of the new generation who have rediscovered Chopin (in large part thanks to Samson’s recordings), would seem to be in his debt.