Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) spent formative years in France and Germany, impressed Liszt and others with his talents as a pianist and composer, and became a respected teacher and composer on his return to the US, dying before he reached 50 after sustaining injuries in a traffic accident and treating the ensuing depression with potassium bromide.

As a composer, MacDowell’s most enduring legacy lies in small-scale piano sets such as the Woodland Sketches first published in 1896, where subtle manipulations of harmony, melodic contour and texture take on evocative meaning. MacDowell alternates between dramatic and humourous moods with a Schumann-like rapidity of thought.

MacDowell’s four piano sonatas break out of the character-piece mould into epic musical statement, as indicated by their titles: ‘Tragic’ and ‘Heroic’ for the first two. On the one hand, these sonatas are large-scale, impassioned works, steeped in the late Romantic virtuoso tradition; yet at the same time, their projection of stern nobility gives them a curious emotional detachment that mixes uneasily with their expansive idiom.

Even in the tremendous First, a homage to MacDowell’s former teacher Joachim Raff, the sorrow is represented rather than expressed. There are few works of the period that are simultaneously so tumultuous and so remote. MacDowell expressed his aesthetic philosophy in words as lofty as his music, which he called ‘a kind of soul-language’. He intended each movement of the ‘Eroica’ to evoke a part of the Arthurian legend, including a spirited scherzo to match the Doré illustration in which the knight of the Round Table is surrounded by elves.

Born in 1996, Giorgio Trione Bartoli won many piano competitions in his native Italy before making his career as a performer specialising in Liszt and the central-Romantic repertoire, and as a professor of piano presently based at the conservatoire in Foggia. This release marks his debut on Piano Classics.