The Best Piano Music

Pianist and educator David Witten's career has included numerous concert tours in Europe, Israel, Russia, China, and South America. He is the editor of Nineteenth-Century Piano Music: Essays in Performance and Analysis, which includes his landmark analytical study of the Chopin Ballades. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, SUNY Buffalo and Boston University, he is on the faculty of Montclair State University. Witten has chosen four works by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who was born in Florence, but whose ancestry traces directly back to a Sephardic Jewish family that escaped the Spanish Inquisition. Castelnuovo-Tedesco's musical style is filled with colorful harmonies and a penchant for modal melodies. Coming to the United States in the mid-1930s, he found work at MGM and other studios, ultimately composing soundtracks for more than 200 films. This recording features both his early and late piano works – two concert suites from 1924 and works from his later years in California.

In honor of Philip Glass' 70th birthday, Sony has devoted two CDs to 18 short works and movements of larger works, from recordings in its archive. The set provides a useful introduction to the composer's work from a relatively brief span in his long career, from 1976 to 1988. It was an exceptionally productive period for Glass; works written during that period include his three large-scale portrait operas – Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten – all represented here, as well as two very popular albums of short pieces: Glassworks and Songs From Liquid Days.

Emmanuel Chabrier's piano music has everything going for it: charm, wit, imagination, unexpected harmonic twists, and more than a few technical challenges. So why do pianists habitually ignore it? Hopefully Angela Hewitt's freshly minted, sharply honed interpretations will inspire recitalists to dust off these unsung treasures. Her keen ear for detail always arises from the music's character and never draws attention to itself. The Schumann-esque Ronde champêtre boasts remarkable rhythmic spring, while Bourrée fantasque's busy contrapuntal lines resonate with the clarity of Hewitt's best Bach playing, yet without sacrificing one iota of scintillation. There have been lighter, crisper renditions of the (relatively) well-known Scherzo-valse, but Hewitt's telling left-hand inflections keep things airborne. In fact, the nine other Pièces pittoresques benefit from Hewitt's ability to give each one its own timbral voice. On paper, for example, Mauresque's steady accompanimental chords don't look like anything special. However, in Hewitt's hands they come to animated life.

Teacher of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, Anton Arensky (1861-1906) divided his life between metropolitan St Petersburg and provincial Moscow – during the second half of the 19th century, as Stephen Coombs points out in his excellent notes, ‘a city of sharp contrasts, fiercely religious, noisy and mournful… [of] sober days… followed by riotous nights’. A contemporary recalled him as ‘mobile, nervous, with a wry smile on his clever, half-Tartar face, always joking or snarling. All feared his laughter and adored his talent.’ Rosina Lhevinne remembered him being ‘shy and rather weak’. Tchaikovsky, like Prokofiev and Stravinsky, had time for his art, but Rimsky (whose pupil he’d been) thought he would be ‘soon forgotten’. Maybe Arensky, drunkard and gambler, was no genius, and he was demonstrably lost among the elevated peaks of Brahmsian sonata tradition. But that he could turn a perfumed miniature more lyrically beautiful than most, more occasionally profound too, is repeatedly borne out in the 27 vignettes of this delicate anthology (Opp. 25, 41, 43 and 53 in full and excerpts from Opp. 36 and 52 ).

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.