Piano Baroque

Masterpieces of Baroque piano literature, in critically acclaimed recordings by pianists with a fine sensibility for the 18th century. Recordings made between 2005 and 2023; new booklet essay; an ideal budget introduction to the world of the Baroque keyboard, full of elegant dances and virtuoso playing.

Hyperion's series of recordings of Bach transcriptions continues with this superlative release by Hamish Milne. While earlier volumes had featured the transcriptions of Busoni, Feinberg, Friedman, and Grainger, this volume features transcriptions by Russian composers. And, as with earlier volumes, the transcriptions reveal more about the transcriber than they do about the composer. In the case of Siloti's transcriptions of the Prelude in B minor and the Air from the Third Orchestral Suite, we find a transcriber of strength and delicacy, of massive sonorities and ethereal melodies.

When it rains, it pours. In our last issue, I raved about a new recording of this curious and rarely heard version of Beethoven's well-known violin concerto—please refer to that issue for details and for a recapitulation of the major recordings of the piece from the early days of the long-playing record. Now here it is again, in a much more fleet reading by the brilliant young Finnish pianist and composer (his own music may be sampled on Finlandia's Portrait of Olli Mustonen and a radiant-sounding, closely miked Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie. The two new recordings complement each other nicely.

J.S. Bach’s genius is universally revered by music lovers, and a significant part of his output was in transcriptions of his own work, a tradition kept alive in Eleonor Bindman’s piano versions of the Six Suites for Solo Cello. Bindman has avoided embellishing these iconic pieces, preserving the intriguing ambiguities in Bach’s implied harmonies and savouring their expressive qualities through the baritone register of a marvellous Bösendorfer piano. These admirably accurate transcriptions reveal the mysterious mathematical grace and flexibility of structure that makes Bach’s art so organic and eternal.

A new enlightening box of mostly live and radio recordings by the intellectual among the pianists: Pietro Scarpini. ""A sterling achievement. For me, the whole series has been a voyage of discovery […] In terms of production quality and presentation. The Pietro Scarpini Edition gets my wholehearted recommendation for resuscitating the memory of a long-forgotten artist. (MusicWeb) Pietro Scarpini was called ""a pianist of prodigious capacities"" by New York Times critic Olin Downes after the performance of the Prokofiev 2nd concerto. Though he studied conducting at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, as well as composition with Casella, to whom the Busoni Op 54 is dedicated, and with Respighi, it is as a pianist that realized his ultimate talent. Scarpini was a rare combination: a highly intellectual pianist with a virtuoso technique. He was a dignified and solitary person with a serious approach to music, single-mindedly following the course of his artistic convictions without compromise.