Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) is widely recognized as one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. In this translation of the first full-scale biography of Richter, Danish composer Karl Aage Rasmussen combines his artistic appreciation of Richter’s career with a sympathetic telling of the pianist’s life based on family archives and interviews with people who worked and lived with him. […]

During his Weimar period, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a wealth of works. Among them are the 22 solo keyboard transcriptions of concertos by his Italian and German contemporaries: six for organ (BWV 592–596) and 16 for single-manual keyboard (BWV 972–987). The latter includes many famous baroque concertos by for example Vivaldi, Marcello and Telemann. This collection of 16 works is […]

Alfred Brendel is an outstanding modern exponent of Schubert’s piano music. He is capable of bringing not only the verve of this music but also its poetic intensity and intellectual depth to life with a special vibrancy. In this unique collection – a 5 DVD box (on Naxos) at a very attractive price – he plays all of Schubert’s major […]

What Scarlatti is most prominently remembered for are the 555 short keyboard sonatas originally labelled Essercizi (Exercises). When he died in Madrid, Scarlatti left this treasury of manuscripts, which were largely unplayed beyond Spain and Portugal until pianist Carl Czerny published a selection of the sonatas in 1839. 34 of the most popular sonatas have been added to Piano Street’s […]

“This is an oustanding achievement, which any genuine Chopin lover and student of Romantic music should own … A landmark in the recording of Chopin’s music … Garrick Ohlsson and Hyperion deserve the greatest success in bringing this important undertaking to such a consistently impressive conclusion” (International Record Review) Garrick Ohlsson was the first American to win first prize in […]

Celebrate one of the greatest piano composers in history, Frédéric Chopin, with us today by listening to the Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman’s performance of Ballade no 2 in F-major while following along in Chopin’s autograph manuscript (available for free from pianostreet.com throughout the year 2010). Or if you are up for an even more exciting birthday experience, print out the […]

Reporting from Warsaw — The stirring strains of Frederic Chopin‘s music are reverberating across the world as music lovers celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday this year — from the château of his French lover to Egypt’s pyramids and even into space. But nowhere do celebrations carry the powerful sense of national feeling as they do in Poland, the land of […]