Piano Works 1936–2000 Josef Tal, Ofra Yitzhaki

Born in Tokyo, she received her musical education under the tutelage of Billy Eidi, ultimately graduating from the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo and the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris. She has accrued numerous accolades both domestically and internationally, including first prize at the All Japan Piano Audition, the Claude Kahn Competition in France, and the Osaka International Music Competition.

Manuel M. Ponce is the precursor of Mexican nationalism, but his music is not based on the fictional recreation a Pre-Hispanic narrative, nor the dazzling modernity of the post-Revolutionary Mexico. A piano student of Martin Krause, who, in turn, was a pupil of Liszt, Ponce’s piano lineage comes directly from Beethoven but his musical soul is deeply rooted in the nostalgia of rural Mexico, the love stories and nostalgic longings of the inhabitants of Zacatecas and Aguascalientes. Like Bartok he collected folk songs, but he also composed songs that reflect so expressively the music of the late 19th century rural Mexico that the lines become blurred. When we examine what he created and what he collected is hard to tell them apart.

With this album, Sanae Yoshida presents five new solo works for the microtonal piano by composers Eivind Buene (N), Keiko Harada (J), Oyvind Maeland (N), Michelle Agnes Magalhaes (BR) and Andreas Gundersen (N). As a musical instrument the piano is, both literally and figuratively, black and white. A paradigm of discipline and order, carefully tuned such that all intervals between the notes are the same, and that all keys, major and minor, sound with an absolute maximum of consistent, consonant clarity. Regardless of what the piano may look like, and how it might have been designed, arranged and built, for many composers an instrument is less a full stop than a question mark, a collection of materials that have the potential to constitute a panoply of multicoloured technical possibilities.

The only collected survey of George Benjamin’s piano music on record, from a Dutch pianist who specialises in new music and has worked closely with the composer.

Yumiko FUKAO has released the recording of Déodat de Sévérac’s complete collection of piano works. This is the first time that a Japanese pianist records the entire collection of Sévérac’s music in Japan.

Yumiko FUKAO has released the recording of Déodat de Sévérac’s complete collection of piano works. This is the first time that a Japanese pianist records the entire collection of Sévérac’s music in Japan.

This fascinating collection of rare and distinctive piano works, from the 18th century to the present, is inspired by stories of how women composers created music while meeting the expectations of family and society. Hiroko Ishimoto brings together a remarkably varied programme including works by Ana Bon who was ‘chamber music virtuosa’ at the Prussian court of King Frederick the Great, the bold harmonies of Vítĕzslava Kaprálová (a student of Martinů), as well as pieces by Amy Beach based on the calls of the hermit thrush, and so much more.

Roberto Prosseda: I decided to explore Charles Gounod’s piano music as I feel that he is one of the most underrated Romantic composers. Famous for his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette, Gounod wrote about 40 pieces for piano, and some of them, like the ambitious Sonate pour piano à quatre mains (here recorded with Enrico Pompili), remained unpublished and unrecorded till today.

Almost every pianist, it seems, wants to record Ravel, but virtually all of them have overlooked a treasure trove of music for solo piano: the composer’s short score for Daphnis et Chloé. Some parts of it are unplayable by a single pair of hands, but with judicious arrangement this working draft can be mined for diamonds. Only a handful of musicians have made their own suites for solo piano; here the Lithuanian pianist Indre Petrauskaite, carefully observing Ravel’s original textures, has produced something new: a 40-minute concert suite of unsuspected Ravel for solo piano that also respects the dramatic outline of the original ballet.