Piano Anna Rose Carter

Over the past five years, pianist Anna Vinnitskaya has made three Alpha recordings dedicated to Shostakovitch, Brahms et Rachmaninov. Evgeni Koroliov is a great master of the piano, a great Bach specialist, whose recordings of Bach are an acclaimed benchmark. His piano duo with his wife, Ljupka Hadzi-Georgieva, has made its mark over the past few years in all the major international concert venues. Also a highly reputed teacher, Koroliov was Anna Vinnitskaya’s professor at Hamburg.

Anna Vinnitskaya celebrates dance, or rather the dances of composers from very different periods and styles: Ravel, Shostakovich and Widmann. 'In all these works, you can feel in some way transported to the world of childhood. Because I believe the childhoods of each of these three composers are reflected there', says the pianist. In his Valses nobles et sentimentales, Ravel paid tribute to Schubert. A few years later, he transcribed for solo piano his ballet score La Valse, in which 'billowing clouds part from time to time, allowing us to glimpse waltzing couples'.

Serge Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto might never have seen the light of day had it not been for hypnosis: before the twenty-seven-year-old composer began work on it, he was on his last legs – financially, artistically and psychologically. Dr Nikolay Dahl hypnotised his patient every day, whispering to him: ‘You will write your concerto. You will work with great fluency. The concerto will be of excellent quality.’ The creative block disappeared, and the concerto’s premiere in Moscow in 1901 was a triumph for Rachmaninov, who played the solo part himself. Anna Vinnitskaya says she feels ‘a spring-like atmosphere’ in this work: throughout there is a sense of movement, of awakening. The music passes through the most contrasting psychological landscapes, but moves towards clarity and light. Rachmaninov composed the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in 1934, ten years before his death. Brahms, Liszt, Lutosławski and Andrew Lloyd Webber are among the remarkable roll call of composers inspired by Paganini’s theme.

The Ghost Ship (2CD): The beauty and brilliance of the piano - a double CD of virtuoso and Romantic music by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Liszt, Skryabin, Dvořák, Saint-Saëns and many more.

Take a journey deep into the mystical world of Studio Ghibli, guided by ARIA award-winning pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska.

Pianist Anna Malikova cultivates a big, singing tone and a generous, lyrical style that couldn’t befit Schubert’s “little” A major sonata better. Her impressively even, pearl-like scales and dynamic thrust in the finale, for example, leave Maria João Pires’ recent DG traversal at the starting gate while looking Richter’s reference version squarely in the eye. Her flexible phrasing of the first movement proves every bit as stylish and “echt-Viennese” as Paul Badura-Skoda’s rendition, but with a surer technique. Unlike Richter or András Schiff, Malikova doesn’t repeat the first-movement development and recapitulation, which is just as well.

Older chamber music fans who lament the demise of the trio formed by pianist Eugene Istomin, violinist Isaac Stern, and cellist Leonard Rose will rejoice to hear of this two-disc EMI DVD set featuring videotaped recordings by the esteemed American trio of Beethoven's complete works in the genre: the three Trios from Opus 1, the two from Opus 70, and the one and only Opus 97, plus the transcription of Opus 11. They will, of course, already have the players' stereo studio recordings of the works released on Columbia in the '60s, but unless they were watching French television in 1970, they probably missed these performances filmed live in the studio in Paris. Istomin, Stern, and Rose here have the same distinctive blend of strong individuality and sympathetic ensemble, of blunt aggression and warm tenderness, of powerful drama and melting lyricism that was the hallmark of the group's studio performances, but with the extra excitement and spontaneity of live performances.

To say that Benny Carter had a remarkable and productive career would be an extreme understatement. As an altoist, arranger, composer, bandleader, and occasional trumpeter, Carter was at the top of his field since at least 1928, and in the late '90s, Carter was as strong an altoist at the age of 90 as he was in 1936 (when he was merely 28). His gradually evolving style did not change much through the decades, but neither did it become at all stale or predictable except in its excellence. Benny Carter was a major figure in every decade of the 20th century since the 1920s, and his consistency and longevity were unprecedented…