Presented as ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’ when it was premiered in 1924, Rhapsody in Blue made George Gershwin famous, and he soon set to work on a version for piano solo, recorded here by Claire Huangci. In her first solo disc for Alpha Classics, Claire was keen to celebrate this centenary alongside her roots in America, her birthplace, where she studied music and made her debut as a concert artist at the age of nine. The brilliant improviser and transcriber Earl Wild (1915 -2010) took Gershwin’s songs (Liza, Fascinatin’ Rhythm, Somebody Loves Me, I Got Rhythm, Embraceable You, Oh, Lady Be Good, The Man I Love) to form the basis of his Seven Virtuoso Etudes for piano solo. Equally virtuosic is the Sonata, op.26, of Samuel Barber, whom Vladimir Horowitz (who premiered the work in Havana in December 1949) regarded as one of the few Americans capable of writing for the piano. The New Hampshire-born composer Amy Beach took her inspiration from folk music, both of the New World and of the Balkans, while retaining her harmonic language inherited from the Romantics. Her Variations, op.60 (1904), bear witness to these influences.