Royal Grand Piano

Sequiera Costa is a legend among pianists. In 1951 he was honoured with the Grand Prix de Paris at the Marguerite Long International Competition. Since receiving that momentous honour, he has played an important role in music history in our time. Dmitri Shostakovich invited him to join a distinguished body of jurors, which included Sviatoslav Richter, Dimitri Kabalevsky, Aram Khachaturian and Emil Gilels, for the First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. As the youngest member of this prestigious jury, he was only a few years older than Van Cliburn, the winner of the competition.

With the Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 7, published by Artaria “for harpsichord and piano” in 1797, Beethoven expands the scope of keyboard technique and structural proportions. Indeed, some of the passagework in the outer movements must have been prohibitive to most amateur pianists; and the length of the sonata, at the time, made it the longest work for piano ever published, and the second longest sonata Beethoven composed (the record goes to the Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. 106 “Hammerklavier”). Metric displacements and violent dynamic contrasts inform the opening movement, while the prayer-like Adagio is possibly one of the most extraordinary achievements of Beethoven’s youth. The Allegro that follows, light and playful, is interrupted by a stormy “minore” section that was most likely the inspiration for the first of Schubert’s Klavierstücke, D 946. The melodious but challenging Rondo closes the sonata, unexpectedly, in a murmur.

No critic in his/her right mind would assert that Ferdinand Ries' piano concertos are in the same aesthetic class as Beethoven's works in the same form. Like the concertos of his early Romantic contemporary Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ries' works are far more about showing off the soloist and entertaining the audience than are Beethoven's more nobly conceived and executed masterpieces. Still, one would have to have a critical heart of stone not to be beguiled by Ries' thoroughly attractive concertos. As played here by pianist Christopher Hinterhuber with Uwe Grodd leading the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, three of Ries' works for piano and orchestra receive splendidly performed and wholly persuasive readings.

2010 release from the veteran keyboardist and Prog legend, a collection of songs written by some of the world's finest composers. Always With You contains compositions from the new and old, all of which have been recorded by Rick in his own inimitable style…