The most comprehensive tribute ever issued on record to the art of the Italian pianist Sergio Fiorentino. Many recordings here are newly remastered and receiving their first-ever issue in the digital age. A landmark set for pianophiles.

This set has been curated by the collector Ernst Lumpe, who contributes a lengthy appreciation and introduction to the booklet of the set, alongside an essay by Christoph Schlüren and Ottavia Maria Maceratini. It was Lumpe who drew the pianist out of retirement during the 1990s, resulting in an ‘Indian Summer’ of recordings made in Berlin until not long before the pianist’s death in 1998. They are reissued here, alongside much less familiar solo and concerto recordings from the 1950s and 60s – ‘The Early Recordings’ – and separate sections dedicated to Fiorentino’s particular, free-wheeling mastery of Chopin and Liszt.

Many of the early recordings were made in the UK for the Concert Artist label under the supervision of Willliam Barrington-Coupe, and some of them issued under pseudonyms (though not attributed to his wife Joyce Hatto, at least not at the time). In 1954 he recorded Mozart’s Concerto, K467, in Naples; the repertoire from those years otherwise focuses on richly sonorous interpretations of German repertoire, from Bach (and Bach/Busoni) onwards, through Beethoven, into fantastically inventive Schumann and Brahms.

Around this time too, however, he recorded several major Chopin collections: the Ballades, Etudes, Polonaises, Scherzos and Waltzes. The sources for all these recordings vary between master tapes (occasionally), and more often the best available LP copies, often of releases issued in very limited quantities, and in compromised engineering, but the artistic value of the performances speaks for itself. Lumpe remarks of him as ‘a real aristocrat’ of the piano and quotes several of his pupils, who recall a musician without ego, demanding and quietly aware of his own abilities but modest and disinclined to self-promotion or fits of artistic temperament.

Alongside some revisiting of this repertoire, late in life in Berlin, Fiorentino turned to Russian repertoire: Prokofiev, Scriabin and especially Rachmaninov, whom he had always venerated as the supreme pianist. If this set bears witness to anything, it is Fiorentino’s place in the canon as one of Rachmaninov’s few worthy successors.