Three 20th-century orchestral scores, Bartók’s Two Pictures, Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, all dating from 1910-13 and all linked (as the detailed CD booklet explains), are brought to life in the hands of two exceptional French pianists. The central interest is the ballet Jeux. One of the world’s outstanding Debussy interpreters, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has added to his complete Chandos recordings with his own transcription for two pianos. Written late in Debussy’s life for Nijinsky, Jeux involves an emotionally erotic and harmonically daring game of tennis. Bavouzet and his well-matched partner, François-Fréderic Guy, play with nimble grace, capturing the works wit and mystery. This gripping album is dedicated to Pierre Boulez, guru and enabler, for his 90th birthday.

The third and final volume in the complete recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Concerti, by François-Frédéric Guy and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Philipe Jordan. Following the critically-acclaimed first two volumes in this series the flourishing musical partnership between François-Frédéric Guy and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Philipe Jordan continues with Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3. Beethoven’s Piano concerto No. 2 in B flat major Op. 19 took 15 years to write and was the earliest piano concerto that Beethoven himself deemed appropriate for presentation to the public.

French pianist François-Frédéric Guy certainly has the prerequisite technique to take on Beethoven's very difficult First Piano Concerto and his very, very difficult Fifth Piano Concerto. As this 2008 Naïve recording demonstrates, he can surmount both the racing scale and intricate filigree of the First Concerto's cadenzas and the rolling arpeggios and massive double trills in the Fifth Concerto's opening flourishes. Guy also has the strong but nuanced tone to balance power and sensitivity in the two concerto's central solo movements as well as the rhythmic vivacity to keep the music moving forward in the works' closing Rondos.

Many pianists treat Prokofiev's sonatas as paeans to the steel industry. François-Frederic Guy, though, makes a priority of projecting the rich motherlode of musical ideas throughout the Sixth and Eighth sonatas. Rarely in the Sixth's finale, for instance, do you hear the motoric left hand chords accompanying the dazzling right hand descending scales shaped so cogently, with every pitch audible. Guy also points up the lengthy first-movement central section's kinship to Debussy's soundworld and brings remarkable diversity of texture and sonority to the second movement's difficult-to-voice chords that perpetually leapfrog from one register to another.

This set is the third and last volume of François-Frédéric Guy’s complete recording of the Beethoven sonatas. In addition to the first three (op.2), it contains the late sonatas, including the celebrated ‘Hammerklavier’. This sonata is not only one of the cornerstones of the cycle, but also a key work in François-Frédéric Guy’s personal musical trajectory; this is the third time he has recorded it. François-Frédéric Guy chose to record the entire series live, in the course of a series of concerts at the Arsenal de Metz, France. He firmly believes that this method, in direct contact with an audience, is the best way to represent his relationship with the sonatas and the interpretation of them he wishes to project.

Beethoven has always lain at the heart of François-Frédéric Guy’s musical endeavours, from his first disc of the ‘Hammerklavier’ op. 106 on harmonia mundi in the 1990s, which revealed him as one of the future great pianists of his generation, to his set of the concertos conducted by Philippe Jordan and a second version of the ‘Hammerklavier’. In 2008 the festival Le Printemps des Arts de Monaco offered him the opportunity of performing a complete cycle of the Beethoven sonatas over a series of concerts in a single week, an experience repeated at the Cité de la Musique in Paris in 2009. A new complete cycle in concert, begun at the Arsenal de Metz in December 2009, will be completed in 2012.

Beethoven constantly calls into question and modifies the notion of time in sonata form. He never repeats himself. The thirty-two sonatas are like a voyage of initiation that runs throughout his creative career, displaying his endlessly inventive imagination. After Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and Sonata in B minor, François- Frédéric Guy offers us a complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, recorded in public at the Arsenal in Metz. This set is the first volume. ‘To play the complete Beethoven sonatas in public represents the most exhilarating project I have attempted, a tremendous artistic and human challenge. Beethoven explores sonic and poetic regions that in my view still remain, even in the early twenty-first century, his “exclusive territory”.