This album contains the two most greatly significant solo piano sonatas of the mid-nineteenth century, coincidentally composed at the same time by two of the greatest composers of the era – who, in aesthetic development and individual character, could hardly have been more different from one another, although their mutual respect is one of the least appreciated aspects of their later relationship.

Brahms’s Third Piano Sonata Opus 5 is a remarkably original work – already, in its five movements, seeking to burst the bounds of the customary four-movement structure, which the first two Sonatas had essayed. Indeed, the Third Sonata is Brahms’s largest work for solo piano and already exhibits a profound unification of the emergent Romantic movement within classical forms – an extraordinary achievement for the young composer.

Liszt’s Sonata is arguably his masterpiece for the piano – a work of such newness of utterance, so original, such a creative achievement as this work represents must have crystallised those contemporaneous divergent schools of thought which was to lead to a virtual war of words between what one might call the traditionalists and those who epitomised the ‘new music’.