SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the return of pianist Peter Donohoe to the label following his acclaimed complete survey of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas with a dazzling new recital coupling Rachmaninov – on the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1873 – and Chopin.

“Rachmaninoff is unimaginable without Chopin,” asserts Russian music expert Marina Frolova-Walker in authoritative booklet notes that point to Rachmaninov’s long engagement with Chopin’s music in the concert hall and recording studio.

Donohoe’s recital explores the intricate connections between the two composers, beginning with Rachmaninov’s Op.22 Variations on a Theme of Chopin. They embrace “a broad array of styles and genres, in a kind of theatrical quick-change routine that leaves us marvelling at the extreme contrasts in music that still embraces the same theme”.

A work Rachmaninov played at both his graduation recital in 1883 and his last public recital, six weeks before his death in 1943, Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata (op.35) boasts a lowering funeral march and a groundbreaking finale.

Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata (op.58) is a work of exhilarating contrasts, intensity balanced by poetry, its high-Romantic style making formidable virtuosic demands of the piano.

Peter Donohoe’s previous SOMM releases include the widely-praised six-volume set of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas. Musical Opinion declared of Volume 1 (SOMMCD0191) “no finer accounts of these still neglected masterpieces will have been offered to the public”. BBC Music Magazine’s five-star review of Volume 6 (SOMMCD0660) hailed Donohoe for finding “a playing style that feels exactly right”.

His other discs include Stravinsky’s Music for Solo Piano and Piano and Orchestra with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and David Atherton (SOMMCD266-2), “a splendid and engrossing issue” (International Piano), and Scriabin’s Complete Piano Sonatas (SOMMCD262-2), The Guardian praising Donohoe as “a masterly guide, his playing both unearthly and earthy”.