Barry Douglas - Rachmaninov, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky - World Pianists

The impromptu was a popular piano genre in Schubert's time. Composers were less bound to strict forms because of its improvisational nature. Schubert takes a different approach in his set. Although each of his impromptu pieces has a different structure, at the same time they are true genre pieces. The first could easily be the opening movement of a sonata. The second impromptu has the character of a minuet.

Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most famous love story in world literature. Sergei Prokofiev turned it into an unforgettable ballet. The music was so successful that he also composed a kind of piano suite from it. Barry Douglas plays an imaginative selection from it.

With his Piano Sonata in b, Liszt composed a unique piece of music. What is special about it is that throughout the piece he makes a number of melodies and motifs recur in varied ways. Liszt does this so refined that one experiences the sonata as an organic unity. This is why Liszt did not like the three or four separate movements that a classical sonata normally consists of. Therefore, like a movie, he composed it as a long drawn-out composition full of interconnections and multiple storylines, which converge in a thrilling conclusion.