Tibor Harsányi is always associated with ‘L’École de Paris’, a loosely knit collection of expatriate composers living in the city, among them Martinů, Tansman and Tcherepnin. He embraced music from a wide variety of sources, notably from North and South America, and this enriched his own music’s rhythmic vitality and sense of colour.

In his piano music, Harsányi drew on diverse source material, a free-spirted absorption of Hungarian traditions, neo-Baroque, the comic and jazz, as can be heard in the 5 Préludes brefs. Baby-Dancing draws on the foxtrot, Boston, czárdás and samba, while La Semaine, seven pieces, one for each day of the week, contains nocturnes of stillness, off-beat folk songs and a wealth of colour and verve.

Giorgio Koukl is a pianist/harpsichordist and composer. He studied at both the Conservatories of Zürich and Milan, where he took part in the masterclasses of Nikita Magaloff, Jacques Février, and Stanislaus Neuhaus, and with Rudolf Firkušný, friend and advocate of Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. It was through Firkušný that Koukl first encountered Martinů’s music, and is now considered one of the world’s leading interpreters of Martinů’s piano music. As a logical continuation of this work, Koukl has recorded the complete solo piano works of Paul Le Flem, Alexander Tcherepnin, Arthur Lourié, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Witold Lutosławski, and more recently, Alexandre Tansman and Tibor Harsányi.

‘A brilliant technique of the pianist, paired with resonant sound, a remarkable precision and an acute sensibility to rhythm serves very well the purposes of the esthetics of “Paris school”. After excellent complete recordings of Martinů and Tcherepnin Koukl starts with Tansman, another great figure of this group. This music of clear pianistic generosity is not at all lacking depth, despite its small size, letting us appreciate the genius of the composer.’ – Classica on Tansman Piano Music (GP788)