Roberto Plano

This will be quite a discovery for those who know the music of Bedrich Smetana only through his grand and nationalistic cycle of tone-poems, Ma Vlast, even if they are yet familiar with his more painfully intimate string quartets or his folkloristic operas. For Smetana, like most composers, needed to eat; and to do so he was happy to make his own contribution towards satisfying the seemingly insatiable appetite of the bourgeois 19th-century public for piano music that they could perform at home. Music of no great difficulty but boundless charm, these miniatures are now seldom heard and even less often recorded, and this is a shame, for works such as the Op.3 Characteristic Pieces show how the pianistic extroversion of Brahms and Liszt (who was a great admirer and supporter of the young Smetana, giving him valuable introductions to publishers) could be adapted to a domestic context, and with the particular inflection of Czech and Bohemian character, derived not only from simple and song-like melodies but also irregularly stressed dance-rhythms that the young Italian pianist Roberto Plano relishes to the full on this welcome new survey.

During the years leading up to the beginning of the 20th century, Edvard Grieg was the most significant Scandinavian composer. He was educated at the Leipzig Conservatory, where his early influences were Schubert and Schumann. Like all of his fellow countrymen of that generation, he was orientated towards Denmark, the Danish language and Danish culture in general. He spent much time in Copenhagen. Later, in his early 20s, he developed an affinity for Norwegian peasant culture thanks to the influence of the great Norwegian musician Ole Bull. That effected a major change in his musical outlook, and for the rest of his life he immersed himself in Norwegian literature and folk music. It became a major part of his artistic philosophy and placed him firmly in the ranks of the nationalist composers that characterised the second half of the 19th century.

For his debut on Decca, Plano has chosen a masterwork that is rarely performed, and that has not appeared in Universal’s catalogue for the last 50 years. This is the first complete recording of Harmonies poétiques and religieuses since France Clidat in the sixties.

Andrea Luchesi was born in the Italian region of Friuli in 1841 and died in poverty 60 years later in Bonn, birthplace of the composer who grants him a tentative foothold on history, Ludwig van Beethoven. It was Beethoven’s far more renowned teacher, Christian Gottlob Neefe, who wrote a biography of Luchesi and described his early training in music at home, then his move to Venice, and his early success as an opera composer.

Skrjabin's piano works occupy a centrai piace not only in his own production but, and one could say above all, in the whole literature of the instrument of the early twentieth century, where it is considered similar to that of Prokof'ev, about twenty years younger .

Schumann always enjoyed playing piano four-hands, even after the injury to his right hand curtailed any hope of a professional career. Playing this way was in any case associated with domestic pleasure rather than concert-giving, though plenty of composers in the early-Romantic era began to supply music for a hungry market of dedicated amateur musicians, Schumann included.

Prolific composer, his catalog includes over 100 works featured in the renowned International Contest Competition and featured in record projects distributed through digital stores including "Oizüruam: Caduti di Nassiriya", "Dream", "Romeo e Giulietta", " Francesco Marino in Budapest, "" Lux Aeterna "," Bruno Canino plays Francesco Marino "," Percorsi "," Fantasia "," Live in Stuttgart "," Virgo dolorum "," Mater Dei " "Selected piano works by Francesco Marino", "Milhaud, Novaro, Marino", "Visions", "Francesco Marino", "Lightness", "Plays for piano", "Mysteries".