These two works are undoubtedly the greatest of the forgotten concertos we have not previously tackled and have been much requested. Both were written by hugely successful virtuoso pianists who were also composers, and both had a major place in the nineteenth-century repertoire, only falling from favour in the 1920s as modernism found its place in the concert hall.

Continuing her inspiring series of discs exploring the solo piano repertory of the Polish Romantic, Xaver Scharwenka, Seta Tanyel here turns her attention to two of his four piano concertos. These unashamedly appealing works should by no means be judged by their relative unfamiliarty; they are among the most impressive of all the neglected concertos championed in our series, as Stephen Hough’s Gramophone Award winning recording of the 4th concerto (CDA66790) has shown. In the capable hands of Tanyel, the 2nd and 3rd concertos are rich with the harmonic poise of Schumann, the melodic coquettishness of Chopin and even the passion of Rachmaninov; a disc as enlightening as it is thrilling.

GRAMOPHONE RECORDING OF THE YEAR 1996. Scharwenka was one of the most beloved of musical figures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His Concerto No 4 in F minor, written in 1908, was greeted at its premiere with astonishing enthusiasm from an audience ‘which may, without exaggeration, be said to have included almost every pianist – virtuoso, teacher and student – in Berlin’. Two years later Scharwenka was to give his first performance of the work at a concert in New York. The conductor was Gustav Mahler. Emil Von Sauer’s compositions have suffered from an even greater neglect, wholly unjustifiable, than Scharwenka’s. The E minor Concerto had already gone through eight printings by 1908 when he performed it in Chicago: “It was no matter for astonishment that when the pianist-composer had brought the work to its conclusion a storm of genuine enthusiasm should seep the house from gallery to floor … Mr Sauer represents a school of piano-playing that has all but vanished. The pianists who are now moulding the taste of the public are, one and all, engaged in the questionable task of reproducing with their instruments effects that are orchestral … but in the meantime we are in danger of forgetting the joys of pure pianism. To such joys Mr Sauer has awakened us.” Two first recordings, played by one of the greatest virtuoso pianists today.

The current Scharwenka concerto discography is thin but strong, with sturdy representations of the Second and Third (by Seta Tanyel, Fanfare 27: 3) supported on either end by recordings that can only be called exceptional: Wild (19:4 and 31:3) and Hamelin (29:5) in the First, Hough in the Fourth (19:3). Still, even someone who has already gathered up all four concertos will want to explore these new recordings by Alexander Markovich, plausibly advertised as the first complete cycle by a single pianist (Laurence Jeanningros’s promising edition, 25:3, apparently stalled mid-way through).