Clementi: Complete Chamber Music With Piano

Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), an English composer and keyboard player of Italian origin, is well known to any student of the piano through his exercises and sonatas frequently used in many piano teaching methods and programs.

There is, in fact, a much larger musical world of Clementi, as we discover here in this eight-disc set of his complete chamber music. An underestimated champion of the early piano, his influence extends even to the towering transitional figure of the Classical to the Romantic, Ludwig van Beethoven.

While not always profound, this frequently delightful collection of chamber music receives fine and dedicated performances from Pietro Spada and colleagues. Here are works that are sure to be new discoveries for most listeners. Newly recorded in 2007, these well-balanced and natural-sounding discs can fill morning, afternoon, and evening with pleasant listening. 

Clementi: Complete Orchetral Works

If at all known Muzio Clementi will be associated with piano music first and foremost. But the English composer, pianist, teacher, music publisher and piano manufacturer of Italian birth did write a relatively small quantity of attractive orchestral works as well. Not surprisingly these include a piano concerto too. This is truly classical music in every sense of the word. This set of 3 CD’s contains six symphonies, 2 overtures and the Minuetto pastorale. And of course the piano concerto, with Pietro Spada as the soloist.

"Admired by Beethoven and famed throughout Europe as a composer, keyboard virtuoso and publisher, the Italian-born Englishman Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) has since his death suffered from a generally poor press...Clementi's output of easy teaching sonatinas has meant that many people associate him solely with schoolroom drudgery. But as his later sonatas, in particular, reveal, he was a complex and original musical personality, with a mastery of large-scale sonata structure and a surprisingly wide expressive range. If none of the orchestral works on these three new discs reaches the intensity and formal coherence of his finest keyboard sonatas, they contain some fascinating music.

Clementi wrote around 20 symphonies, of which only the six recorded here have survived. Together with three separate movements, these have been edited for performance by Pietro Spada, who also plays the solo part in Clementi's only extant piano concerto...The Philharmonia, under the Italian conductor Francesco D'Avalos, give lively, full-blooded accounts of the symphonies... The sound quality is full and atmospheric..." --Gramophone (reviewing original ASV release)