Frédéric Lordopn

The gorgeous early music releases of France's Alpha label, each illustrated with a relevant painting along with discussion of both the music and the artwork, offer a splendid introduction to the culture of the ancien régime. The discussions get down to the kind of depth that academics traffic in, yet the performances are by and large sensuous ones entrusted to some of France's best historical-instrument ensembles.

Many pianists treat Prokofiev's sonatas as paeans to the steel industry. François-Frederic Guy, though, makes a priority of projecting the rich motherlode of musical ideas throughout the Sixth and Eighth sonatas. Rarely in the Sixth's finale, for instance, do you hear the motoric left hand chords accompanying the dazzling right hand descending scales shaped so cogently, with every pitch audible. Guy also points up the lengthy first-movement central section's kinship to Debussy's soundworld and brings remarkable diversity of texture and sonority to the second movement's difficult-to-voice chords that perpetually leapfrog from one register to another.

Beethoven has always lain at the heart of François-Frédéric Guy’s musical endeavours, from his first disc of the ‘Hammerklavier’ op. 106 on harmonia mundi in the 1990s, which revealed him as one of the future great pianists of his generation, to his set of the concertos conducted by Philippe Jordan and a second version of the ‘Hammerklavier’. In 2008 the festival Le Printemps des Arts de Monaco offered him the opportunity of performing a complete cycle of the Beethoven sonatas over a series of concerts in a single week, an experience repeated at the Cité de la Musique in Paris in 2009. A new complete cycle in concert, begun at the Arsenal de Metz in December 2009, will be completed in 2012.