Steibelt

The best-known piano studies are the 27 by Chopin, most of them composed in the 1830s. But Chopin did not create the genre: a number of prominent pianist-composers had already established the piano study, or étude, in the decades before Chopin sat down to write his. Although this repertoire is as good as unknown today, it is a treasure-trove of miniature jewels, many of them announcing the dawn of Romanticism in their combination of Classical delicacy and a new harmonic warmth.

Miroirs is the debut album from the young French-Danish soprano Elsa Dresig. The winner of Plácido Domingo’s Operalia singing competition in 2016, she has performed opera in Berlin, Paris, Zurich and Aix-en-Provence and sung with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in Berlin, Salzburg, Lucerne and Paris.

Nagasawa delivers technically impressive and musically inspired interpretations. I am less enthusiastic about the orchestra whose playing I sometimes found rather dull, dynamically a bit flat and not very colourful. Even so, this disc deserves a positive reception because of the quality of the music and the performances by Masumi Nagasawa on a beautiful historical harp.

In 1803 Beethoven received a piano from Erard Frères in Paris. Why had he been so keen to own a French instrument and how did it inspire him, both as a pianist and a composer? The answer may lie in these performances on a new replica of Beethoven’s French piano, created as part of a unique research project. Placing the iconic “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” sonatas alongside equally grand pieces by two of his Parisian contemporaries, they reveal an unfamiliar French aspect to Beethoven’s genius.