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London-based composer Matt Dibble tragically passed away in 2021 shortly after completing his 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano. His death, attributed to complications from the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccination, left a void in the classical, jazz, and pop music scenes where he was beloved and respected. Dibble’s compositions showcased his remarkable versatility, blending neo-Baroque, jazz, pop, and modernist influences into a deeply personal collection crafted over six years.

After Bach's Goldberg Variations, which won him worldwide honours (including a "Diapason d'Or"), Hannes Minnaar challenges and confronts what has become a "classic" of the 20th century repertoire: Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues, composed in 1951. Here again, the qualities of his pianism, for which he is recognised as one of the leading musicians of our time, come under the spotlight: the diversity of touch and the suppleness between tension and tranquillity to characterise every Prelude and Fugue, the precision of tone, the lack of any affectation, a natural finesse in phrasing and articulation, and a familiarity with the score going hand in hand with a freshness that conjures a sense of improvisation. Here we encounter a new landmark in the crowded field of interpretations of this wonderful music.

London-based composer Matt Dibble tragically passed away in 2021 shortly after completing his 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano. His death, attributed to complications from the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccination, left a void in the classical, jazz, and pop music scenes where he was beloved and respected. Dibble’s compositions showcased his remarkable versatility, blending neo-Baroque, jazz, pop, and modernist influences into a deeply personal collection crafted over six years.

I set myself the challenge of writing a book of 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys and I approached family, friends, and several institutions I had been associated with, to commission a prelude and fugue each, with many of the resultant commissioners asking for references to pieces of music that had a special meaning for them, a request that I tried to follow through wherever possible. Within a very short space of time, I realised just what a task I had set myself. The project took me 8 years to complete, and it was not until 2019 that I finally put the finishing touches to the concluding B minor Fugue.

The Harmony Codex - the seventh album by Steven Wilson - takes you on a trip. A genre-spanning collection that opens up like a musical puzzle box, it presents a series of endlessly beautiful vistas that roll out and shift in front of you. Arguably the best album Wilson has made during a career that’s spanned more than three decades both as a band leader and as a solo artist, it represents the apotheosis of a life spent fully absorbed in music.

The most striking aspect of these Preludes by Chopin undertaken by Eric Lu is the absolutely lyrical tranquility that dominates the forty-minute-long journey which is so arduous to build fluidly and coherently. Eric Lu deserves admiration for the expressive and polyphonic unity that he brings to the cycle, which is usually more contrasted. The American’s playing resounds as his phrases transport you on a grand, noble journey of emotion. Behind this soft façade is a somewhat more tragic melancholy, which increases over the course of the album and reveals the sombre, or at the very least anxious nature of the 24 Preludes. Chopin is at his darkest romanticism, not too far removed from the Schumann of the Kreisleriana (April 1838).

In 24 Preludes op. 28, Chopin’s classicist side governs the work’s unified key structure with the pieces arranged in pairs ofmajor and minor keys ascending in intervals of a fifth. Chopin as teacher prevails in how nearly each Prelude either addresses a particular technical challenge or is constructed according to a specific textural agenda. A Romantic sensibility lies at the heart of the music’s diversity of moods, brash declamatory gestures and frequent harmonic sleights-of-hand, yet, Chopin being Chopin, it is controlled Romanticism, and strikingly original at every turn.

Charles Richard-Hamelin continues his exploration of Frédéric Chopin’s oeuvre with this recording of the Preludes, op. 28, and the "Andante spianato et Grande polonaise brillante, op. 22".

The transcendental heroics of Paganini’s Caprices have presented the ultimate test for generations of violinists; Alina Ibragimova’s accounts of this most exclusive repertoire join a select few of the most celebrated.

The pianist Jonathan Fournel, recent prizewinner of the prestigious 2021 Queen Elisabeth Competition (where he won not only the Queen Elisabeth Grand Prix, but also the Queen Mathilde Prize, the Musiq3 Audience Prize and the Canvas-Klara Award) has joined the Alpha label for several recordings, starting with a Brahms programme recorded in the superb acoustic of the music room at La Chaux-de-Fonds just before the Competition: ‘Over the years, for me Brahms has become a figure I admire so tremendously, a composer I can never tire of.