Piano Rhapsody

4 CDs for the price of 2
Roland Pöntinen first entered a recording studio for BIS in 1983 – at the age of 20 – and released his début recital disc the following year. Since then he has appeared on more than 60 discs in the label’s catalogue, as soloist with orchestra, in piano recital and chamber music programmes. Drawn from this impressive discography, Piano Rhapsody is a wide-ranging collection of pieces which allows us to admire the talent, the breadth of repertoire and the unquenchable curiosity of this ‘pianists’ pianist’. But it is also an odyssey through the piano literature, which takes in the well-known and less familiar (from Für Elise to Carl Tausig’s Johann Strauss paraphrase), and features miniatures as well as bravura works (Satie’s Gnossiennes and Grieg’s Piano Concerto). It also traverses a large tract of music history, making stops in the 1720s (Bach’s Prelude No.1 in C major), the budding Romantic era (C.M. von Weber’s Perpetuum Mobile) and ’the Age of the Great Virtuosos’ (Liszt and Rubinstein, among others) and reflecting the proliferation of national schools in the early 20th century, with composers of Russian, French, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish and Czech extraction. All in all, the generous playing time (5 hours 20 minutes) and the wide-ranging programme provide a unique opportunity to explore the piano and its literature, with one of Sweden’s finest pianists as our guide.