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.