Hartmann

Allison Brewster Franzetti's debut on Naxos invites the listener to compare and contrast four early modern piano works, performed with muscular vigor and sharp intelligence, and presented in a terrific-sounding album. However, this disc's title is slightly inaccurate, for among the twentieth century piano sonatas by Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann is placed Arnold Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, which is neither a sonata nor even of the same century as the other works, as it dates from 1894.

The music of the Ukrainian-born Thomas de Hartmann (1885–1956) has been obscured by his association with the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, but by the time they met in 1916, de Hartmann was already a hugely accomplished composer. The four works receiving their first recordings here reveal a major late-Romantic voice, downstream from Tchaikovsky, a student of Taneyev, contemporary of Rachmaninov, and alert to the discoveries of Stravinsky and Prokofiev.