Romantic Piano Ambient Romantic Nights at The Cocktail Piano Bar (2024)

With this second recording of piano concertos - following the Variations in 2021 - I am extending my Franz Xaver Mozart project. Already at an early stage in my career as a pianist, I felt a special connection to the compositions of Franz Xaver Mozart. It was his 1st Piano Concerto that I performed during my first orchestral performance abroad at the age of 13, that took place in Switzerland, accompanied by the INSO Lviv Orchestra. His music stirred my soul and still inspires me today. After my studies, I became intensively absorbed in Franz Xavier Mozart’s work. In the process, I kept discovering new precious musical gems. His work in Galicia continues to invigorate the multicultural life of the region to this day. With the expansion of this Franz Xaver Mozart project, I hope his music will step out of his father’s shadow, the great master Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and be recognised accordingly. I am convinced that his legacy has not yet been fully explored, which motivates me to continue my research.

Composed in 1882/3, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Piano Concerto was the last of a series of works written in the very happy middle period of his life; other compositions of this period, rich in charming lyricism, included the opera The Snow Maiden and the orchestral Szakza (‘Fairy Tale’). The Concerto was first performed in March 1884 at one of Balakirev’s Free School concerts in St Petersburg and was the last work of Rimsky to be wholly approved of by his erstwhile mentor. While the lyricism is still sincere and deeply felt in the Concerto, the work also foreshadows the master artificer of the later years.

When d’Albert appeared in 1881 at one of Hans Richter’s concerts in London he played his own Piano Concerto in A, but the work was never published and has not survived. However, from a review in The Musical Times of November 1881 we can reasonably deduce that the Concerto had the traditional three movements. The reviewer stated that it was ‘uncompromising in its pretensions to rank with the chief of its kind; largely developed, ambitious in style and character, and rigidly observant of classical form, while redundant in matter’.

Charles-Marie Widor was born in Lyon to a family of organ builders and consequently became an organist of great skill and an assistant to Camille Saint-Saëns at La Madeleine in Paris at the age of twenty-four.

This is the debut full-length release by The Seasons - a collaborative project by an international assemblage of accomplished musicians in the realm of jazz, electronic, and indie-rock. Members include Trenton label-head Sam Rouanet (aka Reynold), DJ/producer/Duplex 100 member Phil Stumpf, double bassist James Sindatry, Sam Rouanet's father Jacques Rouanet, a well-known French jazz piano player who toured the world several times with Argentinean singer/songwriter Alberto Cortez, and finally, cornet player Rob Mazurek, the mind behind Chicago Underground and The Exploding Star Orchestra, who has played with Sam Prekop, Isotope 217, Tortoise, Pan American and Stereolab…

The first recording of Moritz Moszkowski’s long-lost—and eagerly awaited—early Piano Concerto makes for a particularly important addition to the Romantic Piano Concerto series. The coupling is another rarity (and recorded premiere): the Russian Rhapsody by Adolf Schulz-Evler.