Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole … Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.

Horowitz proves on this CD why he was/is recognized as one of the greatest performers of all time. This CD has a collection of music that ranges from soft and serene to vigorous and powerful. Horowitz himself adds more emotion to each piece, and this CD displays both his talent as a piano player and Chopin's wide variety of composition. Chopin wrote some of the hardest music to play, and very few people can play it well and consistent. Horowitz does both at an extraordinary level. If you like either Chopin or Horowitz, this is a MUST.

Just 26 years old, Nicola Benedetti has been making chart-topping recordings for 10 years. This album celebrates the best of those recordings, and her other successes – from winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, to her 2012 best-selling album ‘The Silver Violin’, the highest charting classical instrumental album in the UK of the last two decades. A collection of great violin music – from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending to the Tchaikovsky and Bruch violin concertos and Arvo Part’s Spiegel Im Spiegel. Featuring brand new recordings – Brahms’ invigorating Hungarian Dance no. 5, Monti’s ever-popular Czardas, and Chopin’s emotional Nocturne in C# minor. The album includes Nicola performing with leading orchestras and conductors, as well as some of her favorite chamber players. This album showcases the incredible range of Nicola’s playing and demonstrates her wide appeal. In January 2013 Nicola was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to music and charity.

Another example of superb programming, Piotr Anderszewski's Chopin recital on Virgin is brilliantly conceived and masterfully executed. Concentrating on the compoer's late works, Anderszewski's program starts with two sets of Mazurkas played with supple sensitivity and sympathetic poetry, builds through the last two Ballades played with dramatic intensity and terrific technique, climaxes in the last two Polonaises played with heroic grandeur and tremendous virtuosity, and closes with the tender and intimate Mazurka in F minor as an encore. Anderszewski's technique is imperious, his tone is sensual, his performances are emotional, and his interpretations are magisterial. Individually, each performance is strong and vital. Taken all together, the whole disc is more than the sum of its parts. Virgin's sound is warm but a bit close and sometimes a little too immediate.

Frédéric Chopin was the most famous composer of Polish origin in the history of Western concert music. He was a progressive who revolutionized the harmonic content, the texture, and the emotional quality of the small piano piece, turning light dance forms, nocturnes, and study genres into profound works that were both daring and deeply inward. Born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin to a French father and a Polish mother, probably on March 1, 1810, he was a native of Zelazowa Wola village west of Warsaw.

Frédéric Chopin was the most famous composer of Polish origin in the history of Western concert music. He was a progressive who revolutionized the harmonic content, the texture, and the emotional quality of the small piano piece, turning light dance forms, nocturnes, and study genres into profound works that were both daring and deeply inward. Born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin to a French father and a Polish mother, probably on March 1, 1810, he was a native of Zelazowa Wola village west of Warsaw.

It is grand to hear novice players so successfully take on three of Chopin's chamber pieces, the Cello Sonata, Piano Trio, and Grand Duo for cello and piano. There have certainly been great recordings of these works in the past – one thinks immediately of those by Mstislav Rostropovich and Jacqueline du Pré – but the energy, enthusiasm, and sincerity that cellist Andreas Brantelid, pianist Marianna Shirinyan, and violinist Vilde Frang bring to this music more than justifies preserving their performances. Brantelid has a big but nuanced tone, an elegant but impressive technique, and an obvious affinity for the music, and he is well-matched by Shirinyan's polished technique and empathic accompaniments and Frang's easy virtuosity and lyrical interpretation. The ensemble is poised but comfortable and the interpretations are cogent and compelling. Captured in close but smooth digital sound, these performances deserve to be heard by anyone who loves this music, or great chamber music playing.

The most-talked about artist of the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition created huge excitement and world-wide media attention with his riveting background and “genius-like playing” (Boris Berezovksy). Debargue, who is 25, started the piano late at 11 years old, learning mostly in isolation. After dropping the instrument for three years to play in a rock band and study literature, he started formal piano training aged 20. Placed 4th, he was described by media as “the real winner” of the competition and received the Music Critics’ Association award as “the pianist whose incredible gift, artistic vision and creative freedom have impressed the critics as well as the audience.” Valery Gergiev, the competition’s chairman, broke protocol by letting Debargue play in the winners’ gala and not prizewinner Dmitry Masleev. Lucas Debargue's debut album is a live recording at the Salle Cortot in Paris and documents his first concert in his hometown after the competition. The centrepiece of his first recording is Ravel’s monumentally challenging Gaspard de la nuit.

Passion rather than insouciance is Pires’s keynote. Here is no soft, moonlit option but an intensity and drama that scorn all complacent salon or drawing-room expectations. How she relishes Chopin’s central storms, creating a vivid and spectacular yet unhistrionic contrast with all surrounding serenity or ‘embalmed darkness’. The con fuoco of Op. 15 No. 1 erupts in a fine fury and in the first Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 1, Pires’s sharp observance of Chopin’s appassionato marking comes like a prophecy of the coda’s sudden blaze. Such resolution and psychological awareness make you realize that Chopin, like D. H. Lawrence, may well have thought that “there must be a bit of fear, and a bit of horror in your life”. Chopin, Pires informs us in no uncertain terms, was no sentimentalist.

The art of the 20th century legendary pianists lives on in this century in the creative work of Grigory Sokolov, “the greatest pianist of modern times,” “the world's pianist No. 1,” “a genius” as the contemporaries name him. Sokolov's name ranks with the names of the great musicians of the past – Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter and Glenn Gould. The pianist gives quite a number of concerts annually in different cities of Europe, including a traditional klavierabend in his native St. Petersburg. Grigory Sokolov finished the special music school of the Leningrad Conservatory under Liya Zelikhman, and in 1973 he graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory under Moisey Khalfin. Later on, Sokolov became a professor of the St. Petersburg Conservatory where he taught for a long time. As early as at the age of twelve, Sokolov gave his first solo concert, and at 16 he received the first prize of the 3rd International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1966. That victory signified the beginning of Sokolov's career.

Valentina Lisitsa, a stunning virtuosic pianist, has become the first classical musician to achieve fame via YouTube, emulating Justin Bieber s achievement in the pop world. Having amassed an impressive 43 million views on her channel, Valentina is now in the unique position of going straight to one of the world s leading concert venues for her central London debut. The self-made virtuoso who has achieved all of this on her own without the help of a manager or promoter has now leapfrogged even the world s most revered and long-established pianists and thrown the traditional concert hall route out of the window. Having already booked the 5000-seater Royal Albert Hall in which to perform, Valentina was today in London four weeks ahead of her June 19th date to undertake her own concert promotion. As a thank you to her current online fans Valentina is determined to make the concert a fully digital and interactive experience by inviting fans to vote online to decide what she will play and by fully streaming the concert live via YouTube for those who can t travel to London. This level of online digital interaction is a first for a solo classical concert.

This release features a previously-unreleased recording of pianist Emil Gilels, captured live in an acclaimed 1964 Seattle recital. With the exception of a single work, this recital has never before been made available to the general public and is now being released for the first time. Released in time to celebrate the pianist’s 100th anniversary, the recital includes works by Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and more.

This grande dame of the piano world, possessed of an extraordinarily modest, charming personality – focused on the music, devoted to deeply understanding it – has performed three times during the Chopin and His Europe Festival at the invitation of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute. The recordings on this album come from her concerts in 2010 (when she performed the Piano Concerto in F minor op. 21 with the Sinfonia Varsovia orchestra under the baton of Christopher Warren-Green) and 2014 (when she performed a recital including, among other items, the Nocturnes presented here). A presentation of – by nature – completely different interpretations, which nonetheless form an extraordinarily coherent artistic whole. Superb creations displaying the most beautiful side of pianistic art.

This compilation features recordings made between 1950 and 1959 and proves the outstanding pianist to be an equally brilliant and exciting performer of the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel and Strauss. In addition the compilation boasts highlights from the legendary 1956 Birdland sessions.

Chonguri is the name of the traditional long neck lute from Georgia which inspired Georgian composer and cellist Sulkhan Tsinzadze to write an atmospheric all-pizzicato piece. Its exotic plucked sound marks the eastern starting point of a journey that alights on many European places before finishing off with an equally evocative scene from New York composed by Demenga himself. The Swiss cellist revitalizes the 19th century practice of arranging diverse music for one's own instrument, thus adopting two Chopin Nocturnes and four Bach Chorales (in Demenga's own transcriptions) for this CD recital. Demenga's panorama of poetic miniatures, with Webern's two sets of Kleine Stücke at its centre, features a mix of popular and more abstract musical idioms, blending humour and nostalgia in an entertaining programme.