A real rarity from Hyperion's Anglo-Australian artistic collaboration: music by an Australian composer who was once at the heart of the English establishment. Malcolm Williamson was one of many Australian creative artists who relocated to Britain in the mid-twentieth century. This double-album set of the complete Piano Concertos is therefore an important document as well as a compendium of deeply appealing music. Williamson wrote with a generosity of emotion and melodic flair rare in the mid-twentieth century, in a forward-looking idiom. Piers Lane, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Howard Shelley are the ideal performers of these unjustly neglected works.

Howard Shelley is acclaimed as the living master of early Romantic piano music. So much of this music was ignored throughout the twentieth century that there is still a sense of discovery at each new recording. Shelley here presents the first instalment of a six-volume set of Felix Mendelssohn’s complete solo piano music—perhaps the least well-known part of the composer’s repertoire. Volume 1 includes Opp 5, 6, and 7, the first three piano compositions Mendelssohn published between 1825 and 1827, as well as Op 19b, the first volume of his Lieder ohne Worte, released in 1832.

This second volume includes the Rondo capriccioso, a favourite virtuoso concert piece of the nineteenth century; the three-movement Fantasia in F sharp minor, which was originally described as a ‘Sonate écossaise’, with its characteristic Scottish folk-song elements in the first movement, and two books of the Songs without Words.

Under-valued for a century and a half, the perfected joys of Mendelssohn’s music for solo piano are further unearthed in this third volume of our complete series from Howard Shelley where fascinating early works sit happily alongside Book 4 of the ‘Songs without words’ and the wonderful Caprices of opus 33.

A fascinating new name bursts into our Romantic Piano series with the two concertos by Thomas Tellefsen, here coupled with an extended concert piece by series stalwart Friedrich Kalkbrenner. All three works here enjoy Howard Shelley's trademark dexterity and exuberant bravura technique.

Henri Herz was a phenomenon in 1830s Paris and 1940s America, but today his music is mostly forgotten. He wrote eight piano concertos, one of which was lost. Concertos 1, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 appear across two previous volumes of the Romantic Piano Concertos series. Here, Howard Shelley and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra put on their finest dancing shoes to complete the cycle with Piano Concerto No.2 (the one with which Herz conquered America in 1846) and three extended fantasies.

Cyril Scott's music inhabits a sound-world that is very much its own, despite the inevitable comparisons to composers such as Scriabin, Sorabji, and even the French impressionists. This new recording of the First Piano Concerto – the first one in over 30 years – takes a fresher, lighter approach that is absolutely thrilling in the outer movements.

Howard Shelley continues his survey of Hummel's works for piano and orchestra and this disc features the premiere recording of Le Retour à Londres.