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Grosz - Piano Music Vol.2 | Grand Piano GP956

Grosz - Piano Music Vol.2

£14.26

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Label: Grand Piano

Cat No: GP956

Barcode: 0747313995615

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 10th April 2026

Contents

About

Viennese composer, conductor and pianist Wilhelm Grosz was a musician of remarkable versatility and wide-ranging influences. He attracted critical praise as a composer from an early age with the technically formidable Symphonic Variations on an Original Theme, acclaimed as ‘a dramatic tone painting expanding to symphonic grandeur – on only one instrument’. The Kleine Sonate is marked by great depth and clarity of expression, while the waltz transcriptions tapped into a craze for Johann Strauss II in 1930s London. The highly original Three Pieces was rediscovered just before this recording was made.

This second and final volume of world-première recordings of piano works by Wilhelm Grosz follows on from a first volume, GP927, released in November 2024 and acclaimed in the American Record Guide as ‘inventive and engaging’, and in MusicWeb International as ‘marvellous music making full of character, easy lyricism and an acute sense of mood and idiom’. The first volume focussed on Grosz’s immersion in dance music in the 1920s, complimenting the weighty Symphonic Variations on an Original Theme in this second volume.

Wilhelm Grosz was heaped with critical praise even from the age of 19 as ‘a brilliant talent’, ‘an excellent pianist’, ‘an outstanding artistic individuality’, and presenting ‘artistic perfection united with refined humanity’. His career was however interrupted by the Nazi takeover of Austria, and he fled to England in 1934. His style of music lacked appeal in these new surroundings and he took up composing popular songs, some of which appeared on Decca’s Entartete Musik series in the 1990s. This Grand Piano edition will however be the only source for Grosz’s remarkable works for solo piano.

A fellow native of Vienna, pianist Gottlieb Wallisch has appeared in the world’s most prestigious concert halls and festivals including Carnegie Hall in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, Kölner Philharmonie, Tonhalle Zurich, National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Ruhr Piano Festival, Beethovenfest in Bonn, and the Festivals of Lucerne and Salzburg. Conductors with whom he has performed as a soloist include Sir Neville Marriner, Dennis Russell Davies, Kirill Petrenko, Martin Haselboeck and Bruno Weil. Orchestras he has performed with include the Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra Budapest and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.

In 2012 he was named as a Steinway Artist, and his discography features a vast repertoire, ranging from the complete Beethoven piano concertos on period instruments to the ongoing series 20th Century Foxtrots for Grand Piano, which presents forgotten piano music from the jazz era of the 1920s and 1930s. In its second volume (GP814) these recordings were described as ‘intoxicating fun’ in The Arts Desk, and The New York Times remarking that ‘One of the year’s most surprising and consistently charming recording projects continues to gather steam.’

‘This is sprightly, energetic stuff, thanks in no small part to Wallisch’s crisp technique and deep feeling for the period.’ – The New York Times (on Wilhelm Grosz Vol.1: GP927)

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