Widely recognized as one of the most innovative and influential guitar players since the 1960s, John McLaughlin has forged a musical path that has seen him flirt with everything from hard rock to world music. A fusion player in the true sense of the word, McLaughlin continued his progressive stylistic synthesis on 2006's INDUSTRIAL ZEN.

With his heroic technique, intellectual clarity, and mastery of the coloristic possibilities of the keyboard, Maurizio Pollini was uniquely equipped to give us what is perhaps the single greatest album of 20th-century solo piano music. Combining the contents of two equally extraordinary but vastly different LPs recorded in the 1970s, this CD includes works generally acknowledged to be among the most difficult in the repertoire. In Pollini's hands, Stravinsky's fiendish transcription of Three Movements from "Petrushka" retains nearly all the subtlety of timbre and raw power of the orchestral original. No less invigorating is the pianist's rendition of Prokofiev's Sonata No. 7; his performance of the sonorously intricate finale will leave you breathless. Pollini hasn't shied away from works that are less obviously crowd-pleasing, however. He illuminates the craggy difficulties of Webern's concise Piano Variations with extraordinary subtlety; this is the kind of performance that can capture your imagination even if you think you can't abide musical pointillism. The massive, kaleidoscopic Second Sonata of Pierre Boulez provides the final test for the intrepid Pollini. One of the earliest and most daunting products of the post-war avant-garde, this is as far as one can get from easy listening, yet Pollini succeeds in conveying its bold, uncompromising vision and intricate profusion of rhythmic, harmonic, and textural invention. As a document of one of the few top-rank virtuoso pianists to embrace the fiercest musical challenges of his own time, this disc is priceless.