Chopin 2010 – Celebrating the 200th Anniversary Around the World! Extensive information can be found on the official website available in Polish, English, French to this day and soon in Japanese and Chinese. Special Birthday Concerts is the first of the three key highlights of the Chopin Year. Held by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, the concerts series spans […]

“A superbly articulated performance … enriched by a magnificent orchestral accompaniment.” At this year’s MIDEM, the international gathering of the music industry in Cannes, Ronald Brautigam accepted an award for his recording of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto (BIS-SACD-1792). The MIDEM Classical Awards are bestowed by a jury consisting of representatives for the international music press and media, who selected Ronald […]

Each of the two volumes of Bach‘s Well-tempered Clavier contains one prelude and one fugue in every major and minor key. Often called “the 48”, or the “Old Testament” of piano music (the new being Beethoven’s sonatas) it is perhaps the most important keyboard work of all time. The preludes are very varied in style and often deal with a […]

Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B minor (1854) is arguably his finest composition and one of the greatest piano sonatas ever written. Many places it alongside Schumann’s Fantasy Op. 17 as “the two 19th-century masterpieces” of the piano literature. Although Liszt performed it for his enthusiastic disciples in Weimar the work failed to impress Brahms or Clara Schumann. Robert Schumann, to […]