Pre-Order: Emanuele Delucchi – Stravinsky: Pno Music

A high-grade transfer to LP for Emanuele Delucchi’s scintillating survey of Stravinsky’s solo piano music, originally released in 2023. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) became a pivotal figure in musical modernism with the works he wrote for Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, of which Le sacre du Printemps caused a scandal due to it’s fierce, brutal, and openly sensual character. The quintessential nature of Le sacre is pianistically conceived – those pounding chords and unpredictable accents that fit under the fingers – and Stravinsky no less than Beethoven is a composer who self-evidently both thinks and writes at the piano. Yet Stravinsky’s solo output for the instrument is relatively modest – surveyed here by Emanuele Delucchi within 50 minutes. Even here, Delucchi finds space for a real rarity, an arrangement of a section from the Symphonies for Wind instruments which, in the ineluctable progression of it’s heavy and dense chords, once more revea