Moscheles: Complete Piano Sonatas; Michele Bolla

Beethoven's student, Mendelssohn's teacher: new recordings of major works by a seminal figure of early musical Romanticism.

By 1814, when the publisher Artaria commissioned him to prepare a piano reduction of Beethoven's Fidelio, Ignaz Moscheles was one of Vienna's most popular pianists, and his career as a virtuoso had begun. A decade later he settled in London, having put the finishing touches on the teenage Mendelssohn's formal instruction in Berlin the previous year; the two remained friends until the younger man's death in 1847.

Moscheles' composition has generally been viewed as a natural, not especially inspired adjunct to his considerable accomplishments as a performer and then teacher.