Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Complete Sonatas for Keyboard and Violin, Vol.2 – Gary Cooper, Rachel Podger (2005)
DSF Stereo DSD64/2.82MHz | Time – 01:11:06 minutes | 2,89 + 2.43 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic |  © Channel Classics Records B.V.
Recorded: The Church of Our Lady, St Mary, South Creake, UK, October 2004

Rachel & I feel that, by using a fortepiano throughout, we present a sort of musical ‘level playing field’ with regard to our choice of Mozart’s sonatas included on this disc – spanning as it does such a huge portion of the composer’s life & musical development. While K.6 may at first appear to the listener as amiable juvenilia, sitting as it does alongside a sonata of such undoubted breadth & maturity as K.481, we firmly believe that allowing Mozart’s early – and outstanding – ventures into this genre to speak for themselves by using using the same instruments throughout, we hope to draw attention to his early work in the best way – in a way that is not only so suggestive of what would in time follow, but also seeks to demonstrate the eight year old’s already fecund imagination and uncanny sense of musical line. –Gary Cooper

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Alla Turca – Aldo Ciccolini (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 00:53:51 minutes | 821 MB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: Qobuz | @ La Dolce Volta
Recorded: mai 2011, Paris (Église Réformée de l’Annonciation)

Over the course of his 60-year career Aldo Ciccolini has established an intimate relationship with the great composers. Now aged 85, he takes a fresh look at one of the greatest and says “I understand Mozart now”. For this recording Aldo Ciccolini plunged into the past, to his earliest years: he says that with the Bechstein he rediscovers “the sound of my childhood” and that this new energy does justice to the impetuous spirit of an untamed genius. Although he has played and replayed these three sonatas for so many years, they suddenly rise to new heights, borne of a deep relationship between the two masters. It took Mozart 17 years to write these sonatas; it took Ciccolini 85 to transcend them: “I have these three sonatas in me from my soul to my fingertips,” he says.

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Felix Mendelssohn – The Complete Solo Piano Music, Vol. 2 – Howard Shelley (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz | Time – 01:13:40 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: hyperion-records |  @ Hyperion Records
Recorded: June 2013 at St Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town, London, United Kingdom

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 second instalment of a six-volume set of Mendelssohn’s complete solo piano music—perhaps the least well-known part of the composer’s repertoire. The first volume was praised for Shelley’s ‘immaculate, lightly-pedalled brilliance, unfailing stylistic assurance, warmth and flexibility’
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.

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Felix Mendelssohn – The Complete Solo Piano Music, Vol. 1 – Howard Shelley (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz | Time – 01:14:06 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: hyperion-records |  @ Hyperion Records
Recorded: March 2012at St Michael’s Church, Highgate, London, United Kingdom

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 Mendelssohn’s complete solo piano music—perhaps the least well-known part of the composer’s repertoire.
Mendelssohn composed or began nearly two hundred works for piano. Nevertheless, he saw only about seventy through the press, released in seventeen opera from the Capriccio Op 5 (1825) to the sixth volume of the Lieder ohne Worte Op 67 (1845). Some twenty-five additional pieces appeared posthumously in eleven additional opera. The remainder, whether fully drafted or fragmentary, were left to his musical estate or have disappeared.
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.

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