Alongside the Chaconne for violin, the ten Chorale Preludes for organ are Busoni’s best-known piano transcriptions of works by J. S. Bach. Unlike the Chaconne, which Busoni envisaged for concert performance, he transcribed the Chorale Preludes in “chamber-music style”. A great deal of this organ/piano edition can also be played by advanced amateurs.

Johannes Brahms’ summer sojourn in 1893 in Bad Ischl was productive. Alongside the pieces op. 118, he also wrote his last cycle of piano pieces, opus 119. The composer wrote to Clara Schumann of the opening work, saying that it was teeming with dissonances and that: “every measure and every note must sound like a ritardando, as if one wanted to suck the melancholy out of each single one, with lust and pleasure out of the aforementioned dissonances!

To celebrate Froberger’s 400th birthday in 2016, we are presenting an attractive, handy volume containing four works from his pen. A toccata, a fantasia, and a canzona invite us on a musical journey of discovery into his early-Baroque musical world. The volume concludes with his well-known variations “auff die Mayerin”,

Slow waltzes enjoyed a special vogue in Parisian salons of the early twentieth century, leading Debussy – with a twinkle in his eye – to produce his piano waltz “La plus que lente” (“The Slower-than-Slow”). Parisian publisher Durand brought Debussy’s piano waltz, issued in July 1910, to a wider public by publishing it that same year as a supplement to Le Figaro, as well as in arrangements (by others) for violin and piano and for piano, 4-hands

Following Alban Berg, Anton Webern is the second composer of the Second Viennese School to be included in the Henle catalogue. Webern’s music is known for its extreme brevity and strict organisation. A performance of the Variations op. 27 lasts even shorter than ten minutes – a short period of time during which the audience experiences true extremes.

Given Saint-Saëns’ talents both as pianist and composer, it stood to reason that he would engage with the piano concerto genre early on. But he gave a clear renunciation of the “concerto brilliant” that was dominant in France at that time, declaring instead that “the solo part of a concerto must be set out, and treated, like a dramatic role”

When he switched from the harpsichord to the fortepiano in the 1780s, Joseph Haydn found he had a rich palette of sound colours and dynamic variations at his disposal, and he employed them enthusiastically in his C-major Fantasy