Piano Music

Harold Shapero (19202013), was one of the most promising young American composers in the 1940s and a duo-piano partner of Leonard Bernstein but withdrew from public life. He reacted against the dominance of modernism in American musical life in the mid-twentieth-century by using a Neoclassical language with its roots in Beethoven and Schubert, initially animated by Stravinsky. These three early piano works two of them receiving their first-ever recordings reveal Shaperos superb craftsmanship and his ready wit, in music which embraces the past instead of rejecting it. The result is an extraordinary fusion between the Viennese classics not least late Beethoven and contemporary America.