Welcome back to town Piers for a second visit (is it really ten years since the first???), your suitcase once again packed with piano pieces—thirty-four this time—that don’t get out much but deserve to the way you play them—with style and sensitivity, brilliance and brio, affection and artistry. Splendid selections, too, and considered contrasts to sustain eighty-two mercurial minutes. So, a Baroque Keyboard Suite, which could be by Handel, but isn’t, is followed by Mazurkas that aren’t by Chopin. There are numerous types of dance distilled here, whether barbaric (not by Bartók) or slinky, or a Liszt Tarantella that finds your fingers flying and landing on the right notes, unfailingly. Talking of notes, Piers, you have written a very readable essay for the booklet, which Billy Mayerl hasn’t railroaded, and I wonder if readers—of a certain age—will recognise something humorous as being used as a TV sig-tune, similarly a rag that is black and white—snookered if not. Readers, I could witter on like this some more but best to now invite you to click on the following link for info, listening samples and Piers’s words. Please don’t leave volume three another ten years, dear Mr Lane … Meanwhile Hyperion CDA68163 is released on May 5, and Ben Connellan has done a great job with his microphones. Medals all round for so many delights, the thirty-four.

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