• The second Piano Classics Explorer 10-CD set offers a wide range of rarely heard French piano repertoire.
• The Piano Classics Explorer series offers valuable and attractively themed collections from its catalogue. Piano Classics was the first label to exclusively devote itself to piano music. Since its founding in 2010 it has released countless extraordinary recordings, presenting many repertoire rarities and amazing young pianists. The press has always been enthusiastic about the label’s releases and has showered many 5-star and Editor’s Choices on them.
• This set (as did the first issue in the Explorer Series, the Slavic Edition, PCL 10281) eschews the well-trodden paths (no Debussy, Ravel or Fauré here!), but offers rarely heard repertoire by Chaminade, Alkan, Dukas, Vierne, Roussel, Dupont, Hahn, Godard, D’Indy, Magnard and Dutilleux, a treasure trove to explore and savour!
• The excellent pianists include Vincenzo Maltempo, Alessandro Deljavan, Mark Viner, Mūza Rubackytė and others.

Beyond Debussy and Ravel: the world of the French piano in all its dazzling variety, and in critically acclaimed recent recordings.
Beyond a sensitivity to tone colour, very little unifies this eclectic list of French composers, who flourished from the end of the Romantic era into our own time. To move from the deft sketches of Reynaldo Hahn’s Le Rossignol éperdu, and the scented harmonies of Benjamin Godard’s Op.58 cycle of 20 Pieces, to the introverted gloom of Les Heures dolented by Gabriel Èduard Xavier
Dupont and the four-movement Solitude by Louis Vierne, and from the dense, Wagnerian counterpoint of sonatas by Vincent D’Indy and Paul Dukas, to the restless but crystalline textures of the early Sonata by Henri Dutilleux, is to stop off at quite different stations on a map of creative work full of destinations as distinct as any to be found on the Paris Métro.
Critics have recognised that each of the artists involved has invested intellectual energy as well as technical mastery in immersing themselves within these
individual worlds and personalities. Mark Viner captures Chaminade the poet beyond and further than the salon composer of repute, as well as measuring up to Alkan at his most surprisingly charming in some of the Etudes Op.35. Emanuele Torquati lends a more romantic sensibility to Roussel than we tend to associate with him, while Sofia Andreoli shows that there is an impressionist side to Magnard beyond the densely worked chromaticism of his symphonies and cantatas.