After the death of Erik Satie, dozens of unsent love letters were found in his Paris apartment. Now composer Elena Kats-Chernin and pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska send those letters off, in 26 meditative and passionate piano miniatures inspired by Satie’s extraordinary life and music.

In March 2017, Warner Classics marks the 10th anniversary of Mstislav Rostropovich’s death and 90 years since his birth with the deluxe collectors’ box set Cellist of the Century, comprising of selected remastered recordings.

With his "mature sound, seemingly full of wisdom" (Süddeutsche Zeitung), his sensible, delicately balanced touch, and his interpretive maturity, Michail Lifits casts a spell over audience and press alike.

Recorded live in Paris, two contrasting music dramas on the theme of an errant child, written by two supreme French composers and performed by a starry line-up of francophone singers. Mikko Franck, in his role as Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducts Debussy’s L’Enfant prodigue, starring Roberto Alagna and Karina Gauvin, and Ravel’s L'Enfant et les sortilèges, with Nathalie Stutzmann and Sabine Devieilhe among the singers surrounding Chloé Briot in the role of the Child.

Philippe Jordan conducts the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris in much-loved works by Russian composers: Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ Symphony and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Ravel’s famous orchestration.

This set of miniatures, sometimes called Seven Fantasies, was written by Brahms in 1892. Popular both with the listeners and performers, it is represented in our library with the recordings made by the young Johannes BrahmsEnglish pianists Sam Armstrong and Ashley Wass; Israel-born Benjamin Hochman and Rafael Skorka; the Russian pianist Yury Shadrin; and the Americans Christopher Atzinger and David Kaplan. Joseph DuBose takes an in-depth look into this piano masterpiece by the German composer.

This is the fourth volume of Louis Lortie's highly-successful series devoted to Chopin. The recording perfectly illustrates how Chopin elevated the waltz to a genre of musical art, from danses de salon evocative of a genial milieu to 'works' with proper opus numbers. Growing up in the 1820s, the composer at first viewed the waltz purely pragmatically, as a means to a social end in the dance salon. But after spending time in Vienna and Paris in the 1830s he decided that a waltz might be worthy of the deeper appreciation accorded a 'work'.

Louis Lortie here gives us the third volume in his ongoing Chopin project. Throughout the series his guiding principle has been to emulate the recital practice of the great romantic pianists, who might play a short improvisation before a major work in order to set the audience in the right frame of mind. On this disc Lortie plays the four Impromptus and the Piano Sonata in B minor, introducing each with a Chopin Nocturne (typically of an improvisatory character) in the same or a related key.