Falla Nights in The Gardens of Spain

Limited Edition 41-CDs set presenting Alicia de Larrocha’s complete Decca & American Decca recordings.
Including previously unreleased recordings of Grieg and Albéniz. Includes discs of bonus material: 2 CDs of de Larrocha’s early Hispavox (EMI/Warner) Madrid recordings of piano encores. Includes recordings with Pilar Lorengar, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, André Previn, Sir Georg Solti, Riccardo Chailly, Zubin Mehta and David Zinman. Greatly respected by her peers, not least Arthur Rubinstein, Gina Bachauer, Van Cliburn, Claudio Arrau and Vladimir Horowitz, if you wanted to witness a Who’s Who of New York City-based keyboard luminaries gathered in one place, you simply had to purchase a ticket for an Alicia de Larrocha recital..

From the Notes: Although every truly great pianist has his own tone resulting from his total intrepretation, Gieseking perhaps had the most readily recognizable and the longest sustaining tone of all. His was a pure, transparent, nonpercussive tone of great dynamic range resulting from his phenomenal ear for prolonging vibrations, his masterful pedaling and his panlike inwardly-felt melodic outpouring. Music flowed from him effortlessly and enthusiastically, always colored by his innate sense of the exquisite - a beautiful landscape, the myriad colors of a butterfly wing or a flower. Yet for him tone was uncomplicated: "I have to hear beautiful sounds from my piano". written by Dean Elder

Guiomar Novaes was a notable pianist. Her style was characterized for a sense of the tonal color as few pianist have been able to have it. This recording is fundamental for you , because the Grieg Concert is played with majesty and avoiding the inherent sentimentalism in which the most of the pianists fail. She knew how to get the involving sound , avoiding the excess of sensibility so typical of the romanticism movement. She turns the melody in a sugerent and impresionist portrait, giving a natural gaze not a picture museum gaze. That is why her Mendelssohn's songs without words have no equal rivals. Try to find it.

Warm, lyrical, and aristocratic in his interpretations, Artur Rubinstein performed impressively into extremely old age, and he was a keyboard prodigy almost from the time he could climb onto a piano bench. He came from a mercantile rather than a musical family, but fixated on the piano as soon as he heard it. At age three he impressed Joseph Joachim, and by the age of seven he was playing Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn at a charity concert in his hometown. In Warsaw, he had piano lessons with Alexander Róóycki; then in 1897 he was sent to Berlin to study piano with Heinrich Barth and theory with Robert Kahn and Max Bruch, all under Joachim's general supervision. In 1899 came his first notable concerto appearance in Potsdam. Soon thereafter, just barely a teenager, he began touring Germany and Poland.

Martha Argerich and Friends Live from the Lugano Festival 2009 features a lot of friends but not a lot of Martha Argerich. Although the friends are very good (though not very well known), they are nowhere nearly as good as Argerich, but how many performers could reasonably be expected to be as good as the insanely talented Argentinean pianist? This three-CD set contains 12 pieces, and Argerich plays on just five of them. Inevitably, these are the strongest performances, leading off with a stirring Fantasiestücke for piano trio by Schumann, with Argerich and Renaud and Gautier Capuçon.