Ballade No 2 in F major, Op. 38, was composed from by Frédéric Chopin in 1836 to 1839 in Nohant, France, and on the Spanish island of Majorca. Robert Schumann, who had dedicated his Kreisleriana, Op. 16, to Chopin, received the dedication of this Ballade in return.
Yuja Wang, born February 10, 1987, is widely regarded as one of the finest living pianists. She was born in Beijing, began studying piano there at age six, and went on to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
La Campanella (Italian for “The little bell”) is the nickname given to the third of Franz Liszt’s six Grandes études de Paganini. This piece is a revision of an earlier version from 1838, the Études d’exécution transcendante d’après Paganini.
Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 11, was written in 1830, when the composer was twenty years old. The concerto was first performed on 11 October of 1830, at the Teatr Narodowy (the National Theatre) in Warsaw, Poland, with the composer as soloist.
Trois mouvements de Petrushka is an arrangement for piano of music from the ballet Petrushka by the composer Igor Stravinsky for the pianist Arthur Rubinstein.
Mozart’s Piano Sonata No 13 in B-flat major was composed in Linz at the end of 1783. There is no doubt that this sonata was first published on 21 April 1784 in Vienna by Christoph Torricella (along with K. 284 and K. 454, as op. 7).
Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) who wrote the Sonata K 87 in B Minor was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families.
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18, was composed between the autumn of 1900 and April 1901. The second and third movements were first performed with Sergei Rachmaninoff as soloist on 2 December 1900.
The Turkish March is the third and last movement from Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major (but the Turkish March is in A Minor). Arcadi Volodos is a Russian pianist and composer, born in 1972.
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor is the second in a set of 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies by composer Franz Liszt, and is by far the most famous of the set. Liszt was strongly influenced by Hungarian folk music, with its unique gypsy scale.
