The Best Piano Music

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.

We’ve had several releases in recent years of works by the likes of Lourié, Roslavets, Wyschnegradsky, Deshevov, and Popov: forgotten composers demonstrating an inspired level of early Soviet Era music-making in styles that were subsequently abandoned. Leonid Polovinkin (1894–1949) is apparently next up for rediscovery. In 1914, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, graduating a decade later, and began two years of post-graduate work. He then taught orchestration and analysis at his alma mater for six years before joining the Moscow Central Children’s Theater as music director. Like Roslavets, Polovinkin was an active member of the radical Association for Contemporary Music (ACM), and even created several “collectivist” works—such as The Four Moscows, with Mosolov, Alexandrov, and Shostakovich, and a symphonic Prologue with Mosolov, Roslavets, and Shostakovich.

Anton Stepanovich Arensky and Sergei Eduardovich Bortkiewicz are hardly household names. Arensky’s delicious Piano Trio in D minor continues to keep its place on the fringes of the chamber repertoire, and the Waltz movement from his Suite for two pianos receives an occasional outing; otherwise nothing. Who has even heard of Bortkiewicz other than aficionados of the piano’s dustier repertoire?