Harold Shapero (1920–2013) was one of the most promising young American composers in the 1940s and a duo-piano partner of Leonard Bernstein, but withdrew from public life. He reacted against the dominance of modernism in American musical life in the mid-twentieth-century by using a Neoclassical language with its roots in Beethoven and Schubert, initially animated by Stravinsky.

These three early piano works – two of them receiving their first-ever recordings – reveal Shapero’s superb craftsmanship and his ready wit, in music which embraces the past instead of rejecting it. The result is an extraordinary fusion between the Viennese classics – not least late Beethoven – and contemporary America.

The Israeli-born American pianist Sally Pinkas has been heard as recitalist and chamber musician throughout the world. She holds performance degrees from Indiana University and the New England Conservatory of Music, and a PhD in Composition from Brandeis University, and is now pianist-in-residence at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire) and Professor of Music in the Music Department there. Among her recordings are two CDs of the piano music of George Rochberg on Naxos.

She is joined in the Four-Hand Sonata by her husband, Evan Hirsch.