Recorded for the ASV label in 1990, this collection of Ravel’s piano music has never previously been released complete. Now reissued for the first time in more than a decade, this set presents not the kind of coolly objective view of the fastidious composer-craftsman to which modern recordings have made us accustomed but more of […]

Over the course of the 1990s, the Scottish pianist Gordon Fergus-Thompson recorded five albums of Scriabin on the ASV label. Long unavailable, they are compiled and reissued here for the first time complete with original booklet essays by Bryce Morrison. Interviewed in 1995, at roughly the halfway point of the series, Fergus-Thompson remarked that he […]

Few composers have had their music rearranged with such variety and a high degree of success as Johann Sebastian Bach. Mozart, Elgar and Webern, Mendelsohn, Brahms and Vaughan Williams and countless others, not to mention jazz musicians such as Jacques Loussier, Dave Brubeck, the Swingle Singers and even the rock band, Procul Harum, all rearranged […]

For Claude Debussy, the imaginative life was real life. A musical pantheist and revolutionary, he sensed the very heart of the centre of natural phenomena, their ‘inscape’ or essence; and seeking, as he put it, to ‘express the inexpressible’, he longed to liberate music ‘from the barren traditions that stifle it’. Such fantasy and freedom […]