Incredibly, despite several solo recordings dedicated to Russian composers, this new recording is award-winning artist Nikolai Lugansky’s first Tchaikovsky recital on record. Though less well-known than his operas or his orchestral compositions, Tchaikovsky’s piano music nonetheless contains essential works, such as the 'The Seasons' cycle and the 'Grand Sonata', featured here. Composed at a period of crisis in the composer‘s personal life, they illustrate two quite different aspects of his style: on the one hand we have the fashionable worldliness of 'The Seasons', pieces that almost belong to the genre of salon music; on the other, we see him ambitiously grappling with the classical sonata, in the tradition of his illustrious predecessors, Liszt, Schumann, Chopin.

The group of Weimar cantatas is exciting on many levels. The purpose Bach expressed in his Mühlhausen resignation letter – which became a master beam of the musical edice he built throughout his life – is expressed with an even more seminal vigour, due to the restrictions it suffered previously. Besides the beauty of the surviving works, which renders the loss of the missing ones all the more bitter, it is moving to see the musician engage, with each new piece, in experiments with form, ideas, and the language for expressing the word of God through the most sensitive possible texts. The choice of developing themes dear to him enabled him to afirm and deepen his faith.

True to their mission to expand the repertoire for wind quintet, the Quintet Moraguès performs here masterpieces by two great Russian composers in new transcriptions for wind quintet and piano.

Prokofiev was just 21 when he first performed his First Piano Concerto in Moscow, on 25 July 1912, with his teacher Nikolay Tcherepnin conducting. That same year, even as he was composing his ferocious Second Piano Concerto, Prokofiev was contemplating composing 'a little pendant, something a little lighter'. The Third Concerto has the kind of grace, economy and balance that one might almost call Classical. Indeed, it has stylistic traits in common with Prokofiev s First Symphony known as the Classical . It has become one of the 20th century s most popular concertos.

The baritone Stephan Genz and the pianist Michel Dalberto gathered again around the Lied. After Schumann, Brahms and Wolf, they join Schubert to record his Swansong. That posthumous cycle, with its moving accents and mysterious atmosphere, was made up by an editor in want of a commercial success. However this collection of lieder shows how skilled Schubert was to make a real author of a minor one. Schubert was also the first composer to set Heine’s poetry to music, well before Schumann.

Schumann’s G minor Piano Trio belongs to a group of three chamber works composed in rapid succession in the autumn of 1851, at a time when the composer’s relations with the Düsseldorf municipal orchestra, of which he had been director since 1849, had begun to sour. The Trio followed hard on the heels of Schumann’s First Violin Sonata in A minor; and its opening movement, with its passionately intense main subject and its driving 6/8 rhythm, clearly looks forward to that of the Sonata’s D minor successor which he began barely more than a fortnight later.