Tchaikovsky: Piano Concertos 1 & 3

Tolstoy says: "Tchaikovsky is dead," - and two huge tears (for everything is larger than life with him...), rolled down his great cheeks" (Marie Scheikevitch). To the writer Vasily Yastrebtsev (1899), Tchaikovsky was a man of his time: "When Mussorgsky and Dargomizhsky were forging an extreme naturalism and a genre that was not always artistic - when Borodin was submerging himself in a prehistoric epoch ...when Rimsky-Korsakov ...has been drawn into his own personal, clearly individual, pagan, fairy-tale ...and when Cui ...flies off into a Scotland that is alien to us - Tchaikovsky has been filled totally with the spirit of his age, and with all the highly strung fervour of his deeply sensitive and impressionable nature ...has 'depicted us ourselves alone', with our unresolved doubts, our sorrow and our joys".

A prize-winner on no less than seventeen occasions in international competitions, the young German pianist Bernd Glemser was born in Dürbheim and was still a pupil of Vitalij Margulis when he was appointed professor at the Saarbrticken Musikhochschule, in succession to Andor Foldes, himself the successor of Walter Gieseking. In 1992 he won the Andor Foldes Prize and in 1993 the first European Pianists' Prize. With a wide repertoire ranging from the Baroque to the contemporary, Bernd Glemser has a particular affection for the virtuoso music of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, the work of Liszt, Tausig, Godowski, Busoni, and especially that of Rachmaninov. His career has brought appearances at the major music festivals and leading concert halls throughout Europe and further afield.